Brevity is thy name

       Be Brief, the new Brief

A Little Tooth

Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,

and four, and five, then she wants some meat

directly from the bone.  It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall

in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet

talker on his way to jail.  And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue

nothing.  You did, you loved, your feet

are sore.  It's dusk.  Your daughter's tall.

The appeal of poetry lies in its brevity. Reduction, compression and brevity are the soul of good poetry. Sharp images, compressed timelines, minimalist prose raise simple poetry to highbrow literature. To cut the excess and hone to the bone, to suck the bone marrow out of life is the essence of poetry.

Poetry makes use of contradictions, improbable associations as well as similarities and coherence, to comprehend the enigmatic enigma of life journeys.   Poetry juxtaposes paradoxes to make a surprising whole. It startles, amazes, cuts to the core, finds the essence, and hits home starkly and precisely.

The lesson

Maya Angelou

I keep on dying again.

Veins collapse, opening like the

Small fists of sleeping

Children.

Memory of old tombs,

Rotting flesh and worms do

Not convince me against

The challenge. The years

And cold defeat live deep in

Lines along my face.

They dull my eyes, yet

I keep on dying,

Because I love to live.

Poets have an endorsement of none other than Shakespeare,   who said “brevity is the soul of wit.” Brevity is an art used to the hilt by poets and prose writers too, who excel in short, precise sentences. Art design in advertisements, especially designing of logos, icons, ad imagery relies on reduction of form. This condensation of idea and form to its simplest outline is akin to Cézanne’s etching of essential form in his paintings – to basics shapes of circle, cone and cylinder. All arts and creativity coalesce at hailing brevity monumental to their work, and expression of supreme creativity. 

 

I had no time to hate, because

Emily Dickinson

The grave would hinder me,

And life was not so ample I

Could finish enmity.

Nor had I time to love, but since

Some industry must be,

The little toil of love, I thought,

Was large enough for me.

Five centuries old Kabir Vani, still features prominently today at Litfests in India.  The just concluded Jaipur Literary Festival and The Goa Art/Lit Fest celebrated the songs of Kabir, known for its core of truth; rendered bluntly, presicely, explicitly and bitingly.  ‘As Rumi is to the Sufis, so Kabir is to five centuries of Indians, less an individual author than a bullet exploding through their collective poetic gene pool.’—Richard Sieburth

Moond Munddavat Din Gaye, Ajhun Na Miliya Raam
Raam Naam Kahu Kya Karey, Je Man Ke Aurey Kaam

Shaving the head, Ages have passed, yet no union with God
Recitation of God’s name is futile, when the mind is doing something else

Book art, Twitter and TTT (Terribly Tiny Tales), Flash Fiction are contemporary forays into the art of brevity.  

She washed her body

She washed her clothes

She washed the house

She washed her baby

Paranoid of disease

She washed invisible dirt around, but the fear in her mind

And Whitman said it succinctly when he said:

OTHERS may praise what they like; 

But I, from the banks of the running Missouri, praise nothing, in art, or aught else, 

Till it has well inhaled the atmosphere of this river—also the western prairie-scent,

And fully exudes it again.

Be brief; Be effective.