In his 354th dreamsong John Berryman wanted poets – maybe readers too – to be protected from long poems. Vivat the short poem, but what does that definite article denote? Is the short poem merely an indexer’s term for all and any poem that turns out to be not long, however short the piece of string may be? Or does it label some sub-genre with recognised and recurring formalities? Are there any structural characteristics that link forms as dissimilar as a sonnet, villanelle, haiku, landau or those short poems which are said to have their own moment ‘organically’, whatever that may be made to mean?

Perhaps the short poem is like Wittgenstein’s world: it’s whatever is the case. Or, pace Wittgenstein again, we might discern a family resemblance amongst the sheer heterogeneity rather than settling cheerfully for a polymorphous perversity. Once, that is, you get beyond the plainest feature: on the page a vertically short block of type jutting out from a horizontally surrounding blankness. As Empson in his own short poem ‘Let it go’ didn’t mean: ‘It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange’, though that was his poem about giving up on poetry, short or long.

To chew such cud, take three short poems from collections published in 2022 by Carcanet Press: from Alison Brackenbury’s Thorpeness, Jeffrey Wainwright’s As Best We Can and Les Murray’s final collection Continuous Creation. Apart from their shared publisher, this is a random trio as a falsifiability-zone for any putative attribution of a sub-genre.

Alison ...