“Jealousy is the illusion of clairvoyance.”
Well, I thought it was good. The above apercu is from recentish review in the Times Literary Supplement by Craig Raine of a London production of James Joyce’s only play, Exiles. The TLS was also quoted a while back by John Boland, better known as the Indo’s TV critic. His bullshit detector usually gives reliable readings, and he doesn’t spare the rod even if the program is homemade. (So I doubt he’s many fans out in Montrose). Here he is applying his solid discernment to some very short poetry:
Sometimes, though, a poem can be too brief to carry any substance, I came across one such example in the current Times Literary Supplement by Andrew Elliott . . . It’s called Abstract Expression and, at just one line in length, it must be the shortest poem the TLS has ever published. Here it is in its entirety:
Hard not to envy Jackson Pollock his lack of a full head of hair.
If you say so, Andrew.
And while I’m on the subject of short poems, the English poet TE Hulme, who was born on this day in 1883 and who was killed in action in 1917 while serving with the Royal Marine Artillery in France, was a master of brevity. His Complete Poetical Works, which comprise five poems, none of them longer than nine lines, were much admired by Ezra Pound, who published them in 1912. Hulme was a self-styled Imagist who railed against conventional ‘poetic’ subject matter and outworn language and who espoused a “visual, concrete language” to convey “vividly felt actual sensation” and he was lauded, not just by Pound, but by TS Eliot and other modernists, too.
One of his poems has been much anthologised and you’ll find it most easily in Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. It’s called Image and, like Andrew Elliott’s poem, it runs to just one line:
Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.
I like it.