I myself define a short poem as any poem that will fit comfortably on a single normal-sized page--so should not be more than twenty normal lines in length. I break more pronouncedly with Welch in distinguishing that category from one for smaller poems, which I call "kernular," from "kernel" and "capsular"--and adding a subset of that which I call, "microkernular poetry." Kernular poems are poems less than twenty (or so) syllables in length, becoming microkernular poems when they have shrunk to a single word or less. Short poems are all poems longer than kernular poems but less than twenty-one normal lines in length. The sonnet is the type-model for the latter, and seems a natural size, as many before me have noticed: it perfectly holds a thought, counter-thought and conclusion, or the equivalent of the three. The quatrain, as a holder of a single full-sized thought, seems a good type-model for shorter short poems. A haiku seems the obvious choice as the type-model for kernular poems, for it is generally a kind of incomplete thought--the sensual expression all thoughts are marrowed with, sans commentary. The couplet would be another choice, but a distant second for me because, at its best as lyrical poetry, it would be a fat haiku; at its most traditional, it would just be a lean but full thought, and a type-model for a class of poetry should do what distinguishes a poem from prose: maximize its aesthcipient's fundaceptual (sensual), rather than his reducticeptual (conceptual), experience of its subject (if you'll excuse the terms from another of my taxonomies, which covers kinds of human awarenesses).

As for micro-kernular poems, I suspect many of them are larger than kernular poems because, like "tundra"--and Aram Saroyan's pwoermd, "lighght"--they require whole pages to themselves to achieve full efectiveness. My own "SpringPoem No. 3,719,242" requires twelve pages for the single word, "spring!" Other microkernular poems are really multiple words pretending to be one word--such as Jonathan Brannen's "nocean." However actually long or short various micro-kernular poems are, however, they deserve a category of their own--as the purest possible lyric poems, not being large enough, verbally, to be explicitly reducticeptual (except in the unavoidable but trivial way all words, being concepts, are), so going directly to their auditors' viscera.

It seems to me that the kernular poem may just be the archetypal lyric poem, for it seems to me that all longer poems are either kernular poems with set-ups, amplifications and ornamentation (none of which I disdain) or secondary texts studded with kernular poems-- as Poe had it. Of course, such longer poems, at their best, permit their kernular poems to play off each other, and unite to some higher effect--but so might, say, a collection of haiku.

Haiku. Tundra has an interesting discussion in letters from 1973-74 between Robert Bly and Cor van den Heuvel on the value of this form. It is amazingly under-rated, for something out of the knownstream, no doubt because it is so easy to write mediocre specimens of it. Bly demonstrates the other principal reason: incomprehension in the face of the simply-verbalized pure imagery that is the haiku's main strength. He wants some kind of heightening of language, or surrealization of imagery as in his (mis)translation of a haiku by Basho as "Storm on Mount Asama/ Wind blowing/ out of the stones."

This kind of surrealization, incidentally, is shown nicely in another part of Tundra in which Charles Rossiter insightfully if briefly reviews Bly's Morning Poems, 1998. In it Rossiter quotes this line from Bly's "All These Stories": "In some- stories a wolf pursues us until we/ Turn into swallows, and agree to live in longing." It isn't true of most haiku, however. In general, they present straight imagery, which has trouble carrying the "ah" that Bly believes a poet should put into each of his poems; but they can: for instance, in van den Heuvel's contribution to this issue of Tundra: "city street/ the darkness inside/ the snow-covered cars." This haiku's fore-burden is simply a call to attend to the way snow increases the darkness inside cars on a city street. But much more is connoted: all the absence in some city, or place of substantial human presence; stoppage; silence; the conquering of a human domain by nature; what winter is.

Even better than this haiku, in my view, is a haiku van den Heuvel uses against Bly's condescension in their exchange of letters, John Wills's: "boulders/ just beneath the boat/ it's dawn." van den Heauvel praises the way this poem celebrates light without mentioning it. It does other things, but I hold it a superior haiku for containing a juxtaphor, by which I mean one image placed next to another in such a way as to make the first seem a metaphor for that other, as in this case the boulders act as a metaphor, as they come into visibility, for the dawn rising into the sky; similarly the boat seems edging over a kind of darkness (the boulders) into a day just as the sun is. Perhaps this is a bit strained, but something of what I describe seems near-certainly there, and raises the haiku a notch for me--without relegating more straight-forward haiku like van den Heuvel's to any realm of non- or sub-poetry.

I might insert that I don't agree with the purists among writers of, and commentators on, haiku that haiku should avoid metaphor; the best have the kind of implicit metaphor this one does--for example, Basho's "on a withered branch/ a crow settles;/ autumn nightfall." It is true, though, that a metaphorless (slightly prolonged) haiku, like William Carlos Williams's "red wheelbarrow" can do things poetically that no metaphored poem can: absolute truth, freshly observed can equal truth told slant, though in a different way. As also in this untitled almost-kernular poem from Tundra by John McClintock: