Say Less: Reading and Writing Minimal Poems

In After Lorca, Jack Spicer writes (in a “letter” to the dead Federico Garcia Lorca), “A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.” In “The Spiral Jetty,” Robert Smithson writes that “size determines an object, but scale determines art.” How do we create and experience the life and afterlife (and perhaps even the half-life) of the “infinitely small”? How does a minimal poem negotiate a relationship between size and scale? In this discussion-based seminar, we'll explore how attention and comprehension expand, contract, and contort as we read and write toward the limits of expression.