[Max Goodman]

The majority of the poems posted in Damian's Short Poems thread are jokes in verse--good ones. Clearly, making jokes is something short poems can do well.

The other poems (those, for instance, by Lawrence, Pound, Okri, Welch, Crane, Kristallo, and Dickinson) also strike me as light verse, verse whose primary appeal is intellectual, though I may misunderstand the appeal to most readers of haiku/senryu and poems that operate in a similar mode, like the posted Pound poem.

How long must a poem be to make a primarily emotional impact? What's the shortest poem you know that has such an impact on you? (Maybe there's one in Damian's thread or at his blog that does this for you.)

[W T Clark]

I don't think Dickinson here is comical, passionate rather, and replying to a line of Shelley. Kristallo doesn't seem comical either.
And what about "Western wind", that is full of passion?
https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showp...87&postcount=9

And this Mandelshtam poem is beautiful, the opposite of "light" verse:

The mounds of human heads disappear into the distance,
I dwindle there, no longer noticed,
But in caressing books, in children’s games,
I shall rise from the dead to say: the sun!

[Orwn Acra]

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
And went with half my life about my ways.

[John Isbell]

Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

A.e. Housman

[Max Goodman]

Thanks for the responses!

Just in case my first message wasn't clear: I'm not simply asking about short poems that aren't "comical."

(I don't mean to imply that the poems posted here don't answer my question; I only mean to prevent W.T.'s comments from misleading others about what I'm asking.)

[John Isbell]

I tear up whenever I recite that Housman - but young men think it is.

Cheers,
John

[W T Clark]

Well, since I'm "misleading", some replies.
If you are going to make statements like Kristallo, Dickinson's etc. poems are simply intellectual, then you should back them up with evidence. Me asking such questions is not "misleading" the thread, it's inquiring about assertions.
The answer, is one line, if there is emotional impact in it. As I have shown with the Mandelstam, four lines is more than enough.

[Yves S L]

Hello Max! My first approximation to a technical answer to that question: long enough to set up and deliver some manner of turn-shift-transition, then the emotional impact would be mostly coloured by the emotional quality of the turn-shift-transition. If the poem is answering another poem, then it might only need to deliver a turn relative to expectations another poem has already set up, which might allow it to be even shorter and still be self-sufficient. I can give examples, or even analyze the ones given, but I trust that folk here have little trouble finding turns-shifts-transitions in poems.

[Damian Balassone]

That’s an excellent question Max, I have to agree with you that most of my selections are witty and epigrammatic poems and therefore on the jokey side…but there are a few exceptions which I feel appeal to the emotions e.g.

The Basho haiku (translated by Lucien Stryk)

The Breather by Paul Muldoon

Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier by W. H. Auden

Some of the questions/poems oosed by Pablo Neruda

‘in the mirror’ John Brandi

Visitor by Les Murray

The translations of Ko Un poems

Epilogue by Grace Nichols

On Suicide by Suzanne Buffam

Earth and Sea by Brendan Kennelly

At the County Morgue by Adam Tavel

Starlight by Ted Kooser

and of course….

Western Wind by our good friend anonymous

A few other slightly longer short poems (not on my list) that I think also fit the bill are:

In the desert by Stephen Crane
Campaign by Ciaran Carson
The Fall by Russell Edson
Two Headed Calf by Lauren Gilpin

[Max Goodman]

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the thoughts and the poems, many of which are new to me. Strong stuff!

I've done a bad job of communicating. I've appeared to ask whether short poems can have emotional impact, and to doubt that they can--a banal question, a silly doubt.

Most of the poems cited, emotionally impactful as they clearly are, strike me as taking an intellectual approach, but that distinction may not be meaningful to anyone other than me.

So as not to evade the issue I raise, despite my new doubt that the issue is of interest, I'll illustrate.

Suzanne Buffam's "On Suicide" (People who commit suicide don’t fail to believe in life./They fail to believe in death.) (post#9) makes its emotional impact by sharing an idea. A strong idea. A poetic idea. But an idea. Ideas are intellectual. The poem impacts me emotionally only because I apply the idea to a specific (hypothetical) suicide, whose loss I feel.

Maybe that's how the shortest poems make their emotional impact, by being strong enough to make the reader willing to supply the specifics.

Even the Housman (post#4), which strikes me as less intellectual than most of the others, operates that way. I supply the young men.

Again, thanks to those who've shared thoughts and poems. And to anyone who has further to share.