A Gnat's Horizon

Brian Brodeur on Brief Lyrics in Meter and Rhyme

This essay will also appear in the Summer 2025 issue of New Verse Review. It is the second in a running series on metrical poetry. You can read the first entry in this series here.

In American poetry, lulls between esthetic achievements tend to encourage decadence rather than merciful silence. But brief lyrics can relieve poetic glut. As the young United States prospected for a literary identity distinct from its British forebears, Walt Whitman prepared ever-expanding editions of Leaves of Grass (1855-1892). While sections of “Song of Myself” and other long poems are indelible, much of Whitman’s work suffers from diffuseness, a mania for protracted catalogs, which leaves the poet’s famous yawp sounding logorrheic.

By contrast, Emily Dickinson composed the most abrupt and unsettling lyrics that this country has ever produced, often within a few jagged hymnal stanzas. Written between 1850 and 1886, these metaphysical dirges ring with savage economy, confronting both eros and agape. Dickinson’s compression feels tectonic, as if she’d packed each phrase with radioactive ore. Enigmatic, terse, and terrifying, Dickinson was in her formidable prime when she wrote poem 714:

          No Man can compass a Despair –
	  As round a Goalless Road
	  No faster than a Mile at once
	  The Traveller proceed –

	  Unconscious of the Width – 
	  Unconscious that the Sun
	  Be setting on His progress – 
	  So accurate the One

	  At estimating Pain –
 	  Whose own – has just begun – 
	  His ignorance – the Angel
	  That pilot Him along – 

Misunderstood by even the most astute critics (John Crowe Ransom once dismissed her as “a little home-keeping person”), Dickinson developed her own method of truth-telling that, though slant, can induce a jolt of frisson cold enough to freeze the corpus callosum. She wrote this poem in 1863, her most prolific year, following a personal crisis about which scholars still speculate. Regardless of its source, this crisis manifests in the poet’s characterization of “a Despair” as a psychological condition no one can outpace. Faced with this “Goalless Road,” one must “proceed” mile by mile, like an inmate circling a penitentiary yard.

Nor can one “Man” understand another’s “Pain,” not even Christ. If “He” is a representative Everyman capable only of “estimating” the despair of another, Dickinson’s poem posits a vision of humanity bereft of empathy. But if “He” is God or God’s son, then this poem confronts a cosmic snag beyond human understanding. Given Dickinson’s invocation of two homophonic puns (“Sun”/“Son” and “pilot”/“Pilate”), Christ in the second stanza appears to be “setting” out on his own “progress” through the haphazard trials of earthly existence. Dispatched by “the One” (God), Christ no longer serves as redeemer but as an instrument through which God may experience pain. Like a voodoo doll in reverse, Christ embodies God’s solution to “ignorance,” his way of apperceiving human suffering as more than an abstract concept. A Calvinist might assume that revelation or salvation would result from such knowledge. But Dickinson, who repeatedly chose agnostic doubt over the delusions of pious certainties, was hardly orthodox in her beliefs.

Though subsequent generations did not realize the scope of Dickinson’s achievement until Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), early modernists looked to the brief lyric to lift poetry out of its nineteenth-century doldrums. Reacting against the vestigial Puritanism and vague idealism of the genteel tradition, Ezra Pound, HD, and other Imagists rescued poetry from Victorian frills, producing succinct lyrics with roots in Attic song and Japanese haiku:

          IN A STATION AT THE METRO 

          The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
	  Petals on a wet, black bough. 

Pound’s roughed-up couplet, with its loose tetrameters and assonant slant-rhyme, exemplifies the mechanistic efficiency then infiltrating so many areas of human activity. “Use no superfluous word,” Pound scolded in 1913, three years before the Battle of the Somme.

After modernism gave way to postmodernism’s long fallout, American poetry began again to wobble. During this period, which still informs poetry today, the default modes became hermeticism (language poetry), populism (new formalism), self-obsession (confessionalism), incoherence (elliptical poetry), partisanship (identity poetics), and grievance (protest poetry). Midcentury masters were imitated without mastery; Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich and others were idolized in the church of academe by creative writing professors more interested in perpetuating mediocrity than in celebrating excellence. Seduced by French theorists like Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida, many English Departments abandoned literature for philosophy. As a result, poetry drifted further from American life.

Now, a particularly aggressive symptom of poetic decadence is overabundance. Like compulsive shoppers clamoring through Costco, many of the most celebrated contemporary American poets display an almost pathological urge to pack individual poems with disjointed fragments, flabby backstory, sloppy commonplaces, fuzzy abstractions, gushing pathos, and pointless leaps. Poems and books of poems often feel bloated. (Of the twenty most recent Pulitzer Prize winning volumes, twelve contain more than ninety pages.) In the absence of meter and rhyme, many poems sound prolix, indifferent to the melic possibilities of formal play. Plagued by chatter and lax rhythms, much of what one finds in today’s literary periodicals resembles notes for poems the poet lacked the discipline to write.

Thankfully, a few outliers continue to stimulate the ear with succinct forms. The poems I have in mind are epigrammatic without being epigrams. These poems are not satires or vers de société. They are not aphorisms, proverbs, or apothegms. These poems do not seek closure. Nor do they sprawl in shapeless strophes. As Dana Gioia wrote in an introductory piece on Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (as fine a modern example as one can find), this type of lyric “usually tries to describe a single scene or develop a single idea with evocative finality.” Brevity, in other words, becomes a means of achieving expansiveness. These lyrics are typically meditative, impersonal, metaphysical—chipping away at a complex idea until it breaks open. Longer than an epigram and shorter than a sonnet, these poems achieve in five to twelve lines what much bulkier poems attempt in larger forms, doing more with less.

To illustrate, I’ll look at three midcentury touchstones before considering contemporary work. My first example appeared in Robert Hayden’s third book, A Ballad of Remembrance (1962). This book also featured “Those Winter Sundays,” the only poem many readers know by this undervalued poet capable of producing narratives as disturbing as “Night, Death, Mississippi,” historical sequences like “Middle Passage,” and visionary lyrics like “Frederick Douglass.” Here is that book’s briefest poem:

          SNOW
	
          Smooths and burdens, 
	  Dangers, hardens. 

	  Erases, revises. 
	  Extemporizes 

	  Vistas of lunar solitude. 
	  Builds, embellishes a mood. 

A harsh critic of “race poetry” in which “art is displaced by argument,” Hayden nevertheless adopts a racial metaphor as his central conceit. Without ever using the words “white” or “whiteness,” Hayden presents a variation on a theme less overtly naturalistic than Herman Melville’s whale or Frost’s spider. Yet Hayden’s poem in rhymed dimeter and tetrameter couplets proves more threatening than these prior figures. As an atmospheric condition, snow “burdens” a landscape. As a symbol of oppression devised in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, snow’s whiteness suppresses its chromatic opposite, threatening to erase an entire race.

But, considering Hegel’s Herrschaft und Knechtschaft, Hayden’s conception of whiteness, as it dominates and suppresses, also cancels itself out. If the whole landscape “smooths” to white, there is no way to discriminate one object from another. Monochrome, the world becomes a void. Even the Romantic sonority of “lunar solitude” is tempered by the barren climate it engenders. Yet Hayden, through his extemporizing art, transforms this suffocation into something beautiful. The Latin root of “embellish” is bellus (handsome, pretty, fine)—an aesthetic condition which Hayden echoes through his clandestine slant-rhyming of “mood” with “moon.” Through the assonance of “lunar solitude,” which already has readers hearing “oo,” Hayden plants the word “moon” in the mind without ever saying it.

A generation after Hayden, Donald Justice shared the earlier poet’s talent for devising subtly devastating tropes. Justice’s second book Night Light (1962) also provides many examples of mimetic form, including an elegiac curtal villanelle (“Variation for Two Pianos”) and a playful Horatian paean (“Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy”). Justice’s briefest poem consists of two syllabic tercets with five syllables per line:

          THE THIN MAN
	
          I indulge myself
	  In rich refusals. 
	  Nothing suffices. 

	  I hone myself to
	  This edge. Asleep, I
	  Am a horizon. 

Responding in 1978 to the erroneous notion that artifice of any kind in poetry should be considered “bogus,” Justice reminded readers that “it was never the obligation of words […] to imitate conditions so reflexively.” Yet this is exactly what Justice does in “The Thin Man,” albeit from the opposite perspective; Justice would never conflate compositional sloppiness with naturalness of speech. Instead, the poet compresses a meditation about compression, stretching himself so thin that he becomes “a horizon”: a honed line that spans an entire vista. Surely Justice had in mind the misapplication of Whitmanian sprawl by Justice’s own contemporaries, the Beats. Allen Ginsberg, for example, in his most slapdash “First thought, best thought” poems, mistakes verbal exhibitionism for ecstatic vision. In “Footnote to Howl,” which begins with multiple iterations of “Holy! Holy! Holy!,” one wishes that Ginsberg had indulged in restraint rather than crowding his lines with the faux-mystical yammering and fatuous exclamations that afflict his most widely anthologized poems.

James Merrill shares with Justice a proclivity for formal play and elegant concision. Merrill routinely opened and closed individual volumes with brief lyrics such as “Nightgown,” “Log,” “Grass,” and “Little Fallacy.” These poems range from the elegiac “Dedication,” which concluded Merrill’s first mature book, A Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), to “A Downward Look,” which opened his last, A Scattering of Salts (1995). Perhaps the most memorable of these poems is this quietly devastating lyric that extrapolates an entire cosmology from the typographical features of a single four-letter word:

          b o d y

	  Look closely at the letters. Can you see, 
	  entering (stage right), then floating full, 
	  then heading off—so soon—
	  how like a little kohl-rimmed moon
	  o plots her course from b to d

	  —as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door? 
	  Looked at too long, words fail, 
	  phase out. Ask, now that body shines
	  no longer, by what light you learn these lines
	  and what the b and d stood for. 

Merrill has often been criticized for emotional reserve. The same reticence can be found in other queer poets of his generation such as Bishop and Ashbery, each of whom avoided writing directly about their sexuality, perhaps in an effort to deflect what Langdon Hammer identifies in his magisterial biography of Merrill as the “scorn, social exclusion, blackmail, political suspicion, arrest, bullying, or worse brutality” that often resulted from being outed in the 1940s and 50s.

Merrill’s restraint in “b o d y,” however, conceals a deep despondency. The poet places both “b o d y” and spirit on the proverbial stage of life where the “o” of experience (the “O!” of ecstasy and “oh” of tedium) struts and frets from birth to death without an answer to that most fundamental question “y.” The painful unrequitedness of this query is compounded by Merrill’s having asked it while suffering from HIV/AIDS, the disease that would claim his life weeks before the publication of the book in which this poem appeared. As if removing his hand from a Ouija board’s pointer, Merrill scrutinizes his own b[irth] and d[eath], letters and events that mirror each other, unsure what either sign might signify. Still, given the poem’s implied love cry (“Oh!”), the source of life’s “light” seems erotic—a notion that encourages us to read “b o d y” as a kind of non-confessional confessio amantis.

Though rare among the decadent bluster of contemporary work, brief lyrics continue to enliven American poetry, providing subsequent generations with esthetic palate cleansers amid so much sugar and fat. In opposition to the hegemony of free verse, brief lyrics celebrate the felicities of traditional form. These poems also value impersonality, discursiveness, and linguistic ulteriority over the confession, obfuscation, and easy earnestness that dominates the current scene.

Kay Ryan shares Merrill’s reticence. She takes W. B. Yeats’s remark “all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt” and recasts it this way: “All feelings must go through the chillifier for us to feel them in that aesthetically thrilling way that we do in poetry.” The ice that Ryan uses to chillify is threefold: allusion, restraint, and rhyme. In the following poem, Ryan never divulges which event occasioned this meditation-in-miniature from her fifth collection, Say Uncle (2000). She simply leans in:

          CROWN
	
	  Too much rain
          loosens trees.
          In the hills giant oaks
          fall upon their knees. 
          You can touch parts
          you have no right to—
          places only birds
          should fly to. 

What occasioned this rumination on violations of privacy? Characteristically, Ryan never specifies. But “crown,” “giant,” and “fall” impart a biblical tone, suggesting great power struck down. This is Ryan’s version of David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1 after Israel’s war against the Philistines: “How are the mighty fallen in the midst of battle.” The touching of the giant’s “knees” by an unnamed “you” suggests intimacy and nonconsent. But, rather than sexual desire, the touching of “parts” seems postmortem, like a snarl of traffic rubbernecking around a wreck.

Though I have no evidence to support this claim, the composition date of Ryan’s poem in the late 1990s recalls the national media frenzy surrounding Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, which led to Clinton’s 1998 impeachment. In contrast to the general mood of the United States during this period, Ryan’s sympathies are not with the Philistine congress or the philistine paparazzi but with the fallen giant, whose plight, Ryan suggests with the buried pun of “birds”/ “bards,” can only be understood by poets as lofty as David.

Another slyly political lyric appears in Frederick Seidel’s twelfth book, Widening Income Inequality (2016). Seidel has become a punching bag for critics deaf to the contrapuntal pleasures of satire and irony. Dismissed by many as imprecise, indulgent, and “historically tenuous,” Seidel thrives on the ire of a literary culture quick to deem him “the poet laureate of the enlarged prostate.” But every zeitgeist deserves its gadflies, its doubters, its cranks, especially a contemporary scene lulled by political consensus and deluded by dubious claims of moral superiority.

In his self-appointed role of poète maudit of Hudson Yards, Seidel is more ostensibly offensive than genuinely insulting. Throughout the 500 pages of his Poems 1959-2009 (2009), Seidel’s persona brags about narcissism (“I’ll look good in my black chalk-stripe suit, Savile Row”), condescends to the lower classes (“I get the maid to mop the floor”), flexes his misogyny (“Girls found the sweet-and-sour of being spanked awesome”), celebrates agism (“I hate the old”), and revels in vulgarity (“stool cards pinch a smidge from a fecal specimen”). But, like Beelzebub boasting in some chthonic sauna, Seidel confesses his cartoonish exploits too exaggeratedly to be taken seriously.

It's strange for contemporary readers to think of poetry as providing a service. But Seidel’s work holds a smudged mirror up to American obsessions with violence, cruelty, voyeurism, ignorance, power, and greed. In Seidel’s poems, we glimpse our collective depravities. Readers too myopic to recognize themselves in Seidel’s funhouse self-portraits might point a self-righteous finger and close the book. The more clear-eyed will wince at the veracity of the likeness, reading on.

After the masturbatory shudder of “Dick and Fred” and the mock-Scotch babytalk of “Fred Seidel,” the following poem disarms with its uncomfortable sincerity:

          CITY

	  Right now, a dog tied up in the street is barking
	  With the grief of being left, 
	  A dog bereft. 
	  Right now, a car is parking. 

	  The dog emits
	  Petals of a barking flower and barking flakes of snow
	  That float upward from the street below
	  To where another victim sits: 

	  Who listens to the whole city
	  And the dog honking like a car alarm, 
	  And doesn’t mean the dog any harm, 
	  And doesn’t feel any pity. 

Like Baudelaire’s “Le Crepuscule du Soir,” “City” provides a particularly dark take on the urban nocturne. Seidel borrows from his symbolist precursors the method of synesthesia; the sound of the bark transmogrifies, through the wintry plumes of the dog’s breath, into the visual image of a snowy flower, with its attendant odors, to which the anonymous “victim” (Seidel’s stand-in) “listens.” Seidel’s insistence on repeating “barking” suggests mental illness: that dog and “victim” seem barking mad. But, if we define madness as an inability to empathize with others, the opposite is true. Seidel’s antisocial leanings burgeon into sympathetic “grief,” despite the poet’s claim of apathy.

This admission recalls the more robust Romantic sympathies for ruined maids, idiot boys, chimney sweeps, clouds, rocks and trees. Unlike Wordsworth and his jocund daffodils, however, Seidel realizes the shadow falsity lurking behind even the most earnest claim. Irony, which Seidel achieves through tossed-off rhymes and the ostensible simplicity of too many “to be” verbs, allows the poet to unsay whatever he says. A voluntary scapegoat, Seidel plays the pathological self-saboteur, goading readers to direct their outrage at his persona, which serves as a kind of anti-chorus praising the ills that liberal society purports to abhor.

Heather McHugh approaches the brief lyric with less braggadocio, favoring linguistic responsiveness over Seidel’s side-eyed belligerence. McHugh writes mesmerizing lyrics addicted to puns; she once opened an essay on Dickinson with the line, “It is no accident that book, sentence, and pen are the terms not only of artistic profession, but of penal containment.” McHugh bridges the rhetorical gap between the disjunctive Language poets and New Formalism’s wistful rationality. Yet McHugh sounds like no one else. The first two sentences of “Fastener” (2009) will serve as a representative entré:

          One as is as another as. 
          One with is with another with; 

	  one against’s against all others and one of 
	  of all the ofs on earth feels chosen. 

McHugh plays the apparent reasonableness of the LSAT analogy against a syntax perilously difficult to parse. But parsing and integration are the subjects of this poem, especially as they relate to eros. Conjunctions like “as” and “with” fasten disparate words together, creating a tenuous relation between distinct ideas. Similarly, the preposition “against” links by opposing, whereas “of” establishes connections between objects through qualification. It’s vexing to begin a love poem with a grammarian’s byzantine primer on parts of speech. But what’s more vexing for a poet than language, love, and the language of love poetry?

Author of thirteen collections of verse, a book of criticism, and several translations from Greek, French, and German, McHugh recognizes that words can only ever indicate; language points rather than means, represents rather than incarnates. As McHugh wrote in an essay on Rainer Maria Rilke, poetry attempts to contain or express the “uncontainable or inexpressible experience of consciousness” through an alchemical reaction between world and word. Or, as we see in the following lyric from Upgraded to Serious (2009), world and Word:

          UNTO HIGH HEAVEN

	  Most people trust in will
	  and dream of power. 
	  The man of the moment would kill
	  to be Man of the Hour.    

	  Most people live by asking
	  daylight’s worth. 
	  My God, they’re multitasking
	  everywhere on Earth. 

	  But to inherit it—
	  my Liege!—don’t stoop
	  to seek. Pass up the privilege
	  of being meek. 

The poem’s damned-if-you-do paradox yokes Matthew 5:5 with Nietzsche’s der Will zur Macht. To inherit the Earth, the meek must remain so; the moment they “stoop / to seek,” exercising a will to power, they no longer qualify and therefore forfeit their heavenly reward. McHugh slyly pins Schopenhauer’s der Wille zum Leben (will to live) against Nietzsche’s subsequent idea. Where Schopenhauer saw an unconscious striving to survive as the primary motivation of human behavior, Nietzsche theorized a conscious channeling of strength to creative ends. In other words, Schopenhauer’s Wille is egoless and undesigning (meek); Nietzsche’s requires artful, egocentric contrivance (not meek). For McHugh, “most people” follow Nietzsche, “multitasking” through life to monetize each daylight hour. Even humility is a disguised form of willed striving, a state of being that curses the humble to Heavenly disinheritance.

The tidiness of this paraphrase begins to tangle in McHugh’s third stanza. According to the logic of Matthew 5:5, if God and Christ rule as “Liege” over Earth in Heaven, then God, who experienced meekness through Christ’s incarnation, could be brought low Himself. After McHugh’s “will to power” allusion in the first stanza, the ghost statement lurking behind these lines is Nietzsche’s “Gott ist tot.” And what happens, McHugh seems to ask, once God is dead or usurped? In lieu of a definitive answer, she advises retention of the status quo: “Pass up the privilege / of being meek.” In other words, as long as God practices a Nietzschean will to power, humanity can avoid whatever rough beast a second coming might bring.

McHugh’s disruption of form in her last stanza suggests a further snag. Is the intentional disordering of an otherwise orderly pattern more or less artful? Does interrupted form constitute an esthetic hiccup (will to live) or a shrewd maneuver (will to power)? For McHugh, the answer is All of the above, an outcome that emphasizes the agnostic arbitrariness of the whole conceit, which vibrates with an unresolved euphony.

Daniel Brown is another discursive poet who works best in miniature. Though some readers might consider pensiveness and humor incompatible, the fusion of these elements brings freshness and surprise to Brown’s poems and prose. His uncommonly useful book of criticism Subjects in Poetry (2021) covers several topics anathema to most poets writing today. One such topic is the utility of poems. Disparaging the limits of the mimetic fallacy with which elliptical poets feebly justify an incoherent style, Brown concludes that “another thing a poem can do is override the messiness of the mind’s ‘actual’ workings by providing a sense—also a feature of our mental life—of a certain order to things.” Here Brown marries two modern poets usually regarded as antagonistic. As Wallace Stevens cited the poet’s “rage for order” against the pressure of reality, Frost sought a “momentary stay against confusion.” Poems order the disorderly mind of poet and reader alike, thus distracting us from the messiness of both internal and external realities, at least for the duration of the poem.

A perilously literal reader might misinterpret Brown as some latter-day Augustan. But what he has in mind is more whimsical, subtle, and heartfelt than those eighteenth-century satirists would’ve credited. The following poem remains one of Brown’s most remarkable meditative lyrics, if only because of the unlikeliness of its subject and the stick-shift efficiency of its turn. The poem recounts two different seasonal views from a seventh-story Manhattan apartment:

          ISN’T THAT THE WAY 
 
          A river’s winter-silver
          Discerned through screening trees
          Takes on a certain sorrow
          From the barrenness of these;
 
          Of these whose summer glory
          Can seem a little sad,
          There being not a glimmer
          Of river to be had.

This poem considers the impossibility of having everything at once. Presented with a glimmering river view through a mesh of bare trees, the poet longs for green. Obscured by the fullness of summer, he wants the river back. He can only achieve both prospects through writing the poem.

Brown’s talent for economy (rendering an entire world view in eight trimeter lines) is surpassed only by his skill for counterpointing syntax and meter. Like other poets who utilize the spoken-ness of language, Brown’s speech rhythms sound both authentically idiomatic and completely his own. Think of the way Wordsworth or Frost seem to have caught their best poems fresh from talk. Yet no one actually speaks like Leonard in “The Brothers” or the inconsolable couple in “Home Burial,” not even Wordsworth and Frost. For a formalist like Brown, a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables enables the poet to activate inflections latent within the language itself. Frost put it this way: “The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are endless.” Whether seeking the sound of sense or the tune of tones, formal and free-verse poets who ignore these tensions risk either lulling the reader to sleep with metronomic regularity or deafening us with ear-piercing feedback.

A fellow formalist, Rhina P. Espaillat charges everyday language with a sense of the sacred. Having immigrated from the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship, Espaillat has written in both English and her native Spanish, including prize-winning translations of Frost. At eighty-six, Espaillat published her tenth book of original poems, And After All (2018), which includes some of her finest work not only with condensed lyric forms such as the ballade, haiku, and rondeau, but with longer forms and genres like the sonnet sequence (“Trinacria”), dramatic monologue (“Rosario on Sunday Morning”), and blank-verse narrative (“Nothing”). Like Bishop, Espaillat urges poet and reader alike to look closer, think harder, and feel deeper about those people, places, and things we might otherwise take for granted. Espaillat is especially drawn to subjects with the potential to repulse: gall bladders, error messages, bathtub scum, literary critics.

Espaillat also understands the uses of carefully calibrated pathos, her knack for approaching sentimentality without breaching its threshold. Here is one of Espaillat’s briefest and most emotionally compelling lyrics:

          THE WIDOW CONSIDERS GRIEF 
	
          Should this grief abate— 
	  as I’m told it will—
	  let that happen late, 
	  when I’ve mourned my fill. 

	  Let no comfort fall
	  on my lips like rain
	  until I’ve paid all
	  the full toll of pain

	  levied on our dust
	  for its first desire, 
	  and pronounced it just, 
	  were it even higher. 

Since the Time Literary Supplement published T. S. Eliot’s “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), difficulty has remained a pet topic for writers who fancy themselves avant-garde. But the difficulty that interests Espaillat has little to do with the stylistic allusiveness, obscure vocabulary, and fragmentary surfaces that Eliot and his acolytes coveted one hundred years ago. Espaillat’s difficulty concerns form, feeling, and the dramatic interplay of these.

Formally, this poem is an Olympic sprint: three quatrains of trochaic trimeter rhyming ABAB. Espaillat only departs from her trochaic meter in two of twelve lines—and she does so to illustrate a point. The poet resists the “comfort” of regularity to suggest “the full toll” of her grief, which she illustrates through catalectic disruption. Unlike elliptical or language poets, Espaillat realizes that discordance can’t be achieved without first introducing a pattern. One can enact syntactic irregularity, for example, by abandoning the declarative sentence. But after more than a century of free verse as normative practice, a poem cannot suggest a departure from meter by avoiding metrical patterns altogether.

In 2025, it’s rarer and more subversive to write a poem in form than in unrhyming free verse, especially for younger practitioners educated by academics either indifferent or openly hostile to meter and rhyme. I’ll end by considering three brief lyrics composed in form by poets under fifty, to illuminate the challenges and possibilities facing this genre right now.

George David Clark’s second book, Newly Not Eternal (2024), represents something of a trend among younger formalists in that it includes several poems that conceal their formalism. Most of the lyrics that comprise the book’s central sequence are hidden sonnets similar to Joshua Mehigan’s “Fire Safety” (2014) or Matthew Buckley Smith’s “The End” (2024). Clark’s fourteen-line poems in iambic pentameter rhyme according to English and Italian prototypes. But the poet has broken these into twenty-eight short-lined couplets that a less-attentive reader might mistake for free verse (or duple, triple, and quadruple mixed-meters). As Clark has noted on several occasions, he performs this benign deception to place greater pressure on his abundant internal rhymes. So the Shakespearean couplet that ends the sequence in “Ultrasound: Your Image” gets broken into four lines and two stanzas:

          our half-filled stroller 
          is a double-seater. 

          We framed the ultrasound 
          of you and Peter.

Clark’s use of concealed form also gives these poems an airy ethereality tragically apropos of their occasion: apostrophizing a stillborn son. That discerning readers may be able to hear each poem’s form but are discouraged from seeing it evokes the mystery of Clark’s religious faith; a believer trusts in the presence of what he cannot see. Given that Clark is a Christian formalist writing during a secular age of free verse, the clandestine formalism of these poems seems one way of coexisting amid a poetic culture of opposing views.

The poem I’d like to consider, however, versifies more openly:

          MOSQUITO 

          God was only acting godly
          when he strapped a dirty needle
          to the fly
          and taught it how to curtsy
          on our knees and elbows 

          on our necks and earlobes
          so politely that it hardly  
          stirs an eye. 
          God was hard but speaking softly
          when He told us we should die. 

The trochaic pulse of this brief lyric echoes the witches’ spell in Act Four of Macbeth. Metrically, Clark’s poem mimics the first two and a half lines of Shakespeare’s song with a journeyman’s proficiency (minus the punctuated caesuras of Shakespeare’s first line):

          Double, double, toil and trouble, 
	  Fire burn and cauldron bubble . . .
	  Eye of newt

But Clark’s use of form is quieter, “speaking softly” to deliver the “hard” news of contact with the mosquito’s “dirty needle.” The “godly” act of modifying the face of the fly suggests a cruel or indifferent creator who takes pleasure in the pain of his creations. Clark’s representation of God resolves the hardness of the Old Testament Jehovah with the “Love thy neighbor” of the New Testament Christ. Clark’s God, though, displays the manners of the Southern gentry, politely curtsying, offering a sideways Bless your heart while He metes out disease and death as casually as a mosquito drinks.

The word “should” provides the coup de grâce. Clark could’ve easily opted for “would,” which would’ve implied the simple inevitability of death. “Should” suggests that death is the proper, reasonable, and best outcome of earthly life. This emphasis on the auxiliary shifts the focus from the physical fact of death to a moral dimension accounting for the wages of sin: death as a divinely sanctioned—or divinely desired—punishment for life. But a punishment without which redemption remains impossible.

Another younger, Southern poet with metaphysical preoccupations, Caki Wilkinson writes from a more materialistic point of view. Wilkinson’s third collection, The Survival Expo (2021), distills public subjects through the poet’s oddball sensibility, plucky diction, and formal play. Wilkinson juxtaposes difficult domestic issues like spousal abuse and date rape with broader socio-political topics like doomsday prepping, Title IX, and gun violence.

Whether formal or free, Wilkinson’s work is informed by the compression and musicality she’s acquired from decades of writing in meter and rhyme. During a 2021 podcast interview with The Sewanee Review, Wilkinson summarized her perspective on tradition and experiment this way: “If you were taught in the formalist tradition as I was, you’re taught everything needs to be very clear. It should be neat—a well-wrought urn of a poem.” About writing The Survival Expo, she adds, “I was really interested in these forms that kind of break down.” Accomplished in forms like the sonnet (“Rite Performed with the Aid of High School Exes”) and elegiac quatrains (“Testimony”), Wilkinson also manipulates traditional poetics in work that strains against the constraints of unwieldier forms like the reverse abecedarian, the anagram poem, and mock georgics.

Her most trenchant innovations include lyrics on metaphysical themes. In poems such as “Obstinate Gospel,” “Suppositions for Skeptics,” and “Mansplaining Oracle,” Wilkinson sings her “semi-hymns” to an “untrue god,” calling out “another myth we live against.” The following brief lyric posits an apophatic notion of God attained through a kind of unknowing of the self:

          VIA NEGATIVA 
		
          In kingdoms
	  where God’s not
	  a factor— 

	  multiplied,
	  divided— 
	  I decide 

	  all that counts. 
	  There will be 
	  no sermons

	  and no mounts, 
	  just airfields, 
	  stretched out, blue, 

	  says a voice
	  who reminds 
	  you of you.  

The form of this poem can be said to embody or at least suggest a tripartite God through tercets comprised of three-syllable lines. This kind of formalism “counts” what accentual-syllabic verse would allow the reader to hear. In a secular landscape of kingdoms with neither king nor King, God’s absence is filled by “I” and “you” who get to “decide” for ourselves what “will be.” Crucially, this realm without God is not godless; “will be” could allude to this world, the next, or both. Endowed with choice, inhabitants are free to enter into dialogic relation with ourselves and all manner of others (trees, animals, places, objects, ideas), including a divine “you”—or “Thou,” as Martin Buber would have it.

But the most conspicuous “factor” of Wilkinson’s poem is its compression. Contained within forty-five syllables (fifty-one with the title), “Via Negativa” either asserts or implies the following fundamental theological quandaries: Does God exist (“God’s not / a factor”)? Does “God” include everything (“multiplied”)? If God exists, does the Devil (“divided”)? Does free will exist (“I decide”)? If God is conscious of the world, does He pay attention to what happens here (“all that counts”)? If he does pay attention, does He despair as we suffer (“blue”)? Is God eternal (“stretched out”)? Or is God merely a human invention (“reminds / you of you”)? Wilkinson’s poem shuffles through these ancient unanswerables with such a light touch that one wonders if a more concise mode of poetic inquiry beside the brief lyric has ever been devised. Perhaps the Zen koan.

As with Wilkinson, Armen Davoudian applies a consummately light touch to heavy material. Davoudian’s subjects range from political assassination, travel bans, and genocide to the ethics of translation, family nostalgia, and growing up Armenian and queer in a Persian culture. Throughout his first collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars (2024), Davoudian writes poems preoccupied by reflections and refractions; the title sequence, for example, depicts a palace in Isfahan in which the structure’s twenty pillars become forty in a reflecting pool. This doubling doubles as a kind of formal principle in Davoudian’s sly use of rhyme. In “Passage,” for example, Davoudian links “ammo” and “te amo,” a devastating sonic pairing.

This formal experimentation finds its most concise articulation in the following brief lyric. This poem takes advantage of echo rhyme, sighing with an exile’s dolor, as if the poet were corresponding from Tomis:

          MIRROR 

	  Whose eyes are those that glisten	        Listen
	  behind my darker eyes?		                Cries 

	  Whose silent lips that part		        Heart
	  like fish in that silvered lake?		        Ache

	  Who writes across your page?	                Age
	  Who stirs behind your gloss? 		        Loss 

Davoudian alludes here to the Dickinsonian riddle poem. But, unlike Dickinson, whose answers she only teasingly provided in the form of objects enclosed within letters (a cocoon, a leaf, a pine needle), Davoudian’s solutions are sonically embedded within the questions themselves (“page”: Age; “gloss”: Loss). The poet’s use of echo rhyme recalls precedents as far-reaching as George Herbert’s “Heaven” in the seventeenth century and Jonathan Swift’s “A Gentle Echo on Woman” in the eighteenth, as well as twentieth century examples like Louis MacNeice’s “Sunlight on the Garden” (1937) and Mark Strand’s “Sleeping with One Eye Open” (1962).

As in Fred Chappell’s “Narcissus and Echo” (1983), Davoudian composes a reverse acrostic that provides a “gloss” for the questions that the poem asks. Though Davoudian’s telestich is sparser than Chappell’s, a prose version of Davoudian’s would read, “Listen, cries Heartache: Age = Loss.” Reflecting on his reflection, the poet becomes his own muse. Like Narcissus, whom Tiresias prophesied would lead a good life only if Narcissus could manage never to know himself, Davoudian’s narrator scrutinizes his likeness for what lies “behind” external appearances. Such a stubbornly fixed gaze engenders suffering. As time passes, the “silvered lake” of the mirror dooms Narcissus and Davoudian alike to witness their own diminishment: Narcissus withering with incurable self-love; Davoudian aging alone with each passing decade.

As Davoudian noted in a 2024 interview with Academy of American Poets, poetry not only slows the process of loss, it makes something new out of it, allowing writer and reader “not just to preserve what was there to begin with but to supply what is missing.” Davoudian answers his own questions, parsing the double riddle of the self as if reading a parallel text. He also nudges the reader beyond his poem’s call-and-response to the source of the cry that “Mirror” answers: James Merrill’s 1959 poem of the same title.

Davoudian’s “The Yellow Swan,” the poem that follows “Mirror” in Forty Pillars, cribs the rhyme scheme and mixed-metrical pattern of Merrill’s “The Black Swan” (1946) to elaborate the older poet’s theme of nascent queer sexuality. Similarly, Davoudian’s “Mirror” mirrors Merrill’s idea that the poet can only see outwardly by first looking inwardly. Davoudian’s echo rhymes allude to Merrill’s apocopated couplets—a complex method of rhyming in which the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable of each odd line repeats in the ultimate syllable of each even line. So the last syllable of “nonsense” rhymes with the third-to-last syllable of “in-tens-i-ty” and “change” rhymes with the next-to-last syllable of “ar-range-ment.” (Merrill utilizes the same method in “Octopus” and “Saint,” all three poems appearing in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace.)

A dramatic monologue spoken by a mirror apostrophizing a window, Merrill’s “Mirror” condescends to its auditor for remaining “wide open, sunny, everything I am / not.” The verse here has it both ways through Merrill’s wry enjambment; the mirror, reflecting the window’s “wide open” prospect on the exterior world, contains only the illusion of openness. Merrill and Davoudian equate self-consciousness with conscious technique; both poems are ars poeticas that privilege interiority and artifice over artless exteriority. Both poets also recognize the narcissistic temptation inherent within the artist’s self-delineating temperament. But, where Davoudian seeks the image “behind” his reflection—the prototype latent within the duplicate—Merrill desires the superior amusement of poetry’s ironic surfaces, reflecting only the “conceit” of the window’s undiscriminating eye.

This window-versus-mirror trope reflects a competing view of poetry still relevant today. Poets writing the kind of brief lyric covered in this essay eschew the casual, democratic “I” epitomized by Whitman, favoring the economy of Dickinson’s exacting vision. The impersonality (or trans-personality) of these poems, as well as their innovations with meter and rhyme, assert the notion of lyric as artful artifact rather than self-expressive performance.

My contention has been that the fastidiousness, wit, formal play, and musicality of these brief lyrics oppose the excesses of the decadent age in which they were composed. Even when writing about tragic subject matter, Espaillat, Clark, and Davoudian refuse the sentimentalism that has become standard operating procedure among their contemporaries. Ryan, McHugh, Brown, and others utilize humor and a tone of bemused equivocation to confront serious metaphysical and sociopolitical topics. Where most contemporary practitioners default to a kind of cloying earnestness (the tone de jure), these poets mix idiomatic speech, irony, and familiar poetic forms in lyrics that transcend merely autobiographical concerns.

The most interesting poets writing today appreciate that the richest monuments have often been the sparest. By valuing the evocative attenuations of Alberto Giacometti’s Le Chien (1951), for example, over the zany excesses of Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog series (1994), brief lyrics lodge in the imagination with a force that belies their miniature dimensions. The redolent distillations of these poems render their more decadent counterparts forgettable. Yet, as Dickinson reminds us in poem 574, such lesser losses “a Gnat’s Horizon / Could easily outgrow.”

Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry books, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the 2022 New Criterion Poetry Prize. Recent poems and literary criticism appear in The Hopkins Review, Image, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Pushcart Prize XLIX (2025). He lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley.