Larger Context

In isolation it's easy to make fun of many short poems. Take William Carlos Williams's famous:

Thin? Maybe. But in fairness, those verses can't be read alone. They're part of a matrix that includes the poet's other work, the situation he was in he wrote them, other poems of the time, etc.—all the way up to the entire human experience, from prehistory to the present moment. It's a huge setting, within which the briefest twinkle can sometimes, for some readers, have a richness beyond itself.

(cf. PoeticProcesses (2002-03-03), BreakBlowBurn (2005-05-11), InThePalmOfYourHand (2006-09-11), ...) - ^z - 2009-06-25