Small Talk

Author's Foreword: Why short poems? Although compactness and density are important poetic virtues, I never set out to write poems of a certain length: a poem should be as long as it needs to be and not a syllable longer. But small things risk going unnoticed. Thus, although some of these poems have appeared in my previous twelve books, since most reviewers focus on the supposedly more 'serious' longer poems, they have received little attention.

Moreover, because many Canadian poets still seem self-consciously caught up in creating the 'great Canadian poem', the national literary monument, those qualities of irony and wit, as distinct from broad humour and whimsy, that often characterize short poems tend not to be so highly prized. For the most part, Canadian poets - P.K. Page and Pat Lowther are two BC exceptions - are more likely to honour Whitman than Dickinson.

Obviously short poems are best suited for epigrammatic insights into public life, the verbal equivalent of a good political cartoon, as also for thumbnail sketches of people, animals or cityscapes. Just as in painting, sometimes, an oil sketch or an apparently slight drawing will elicit an atmosphere, a charm and a sense of transience denied to the more solemn, fully finished masterpiece - think Rembrandt, Watteau, Goya, Daumier - so too, I hope, some of these snapshots will capture, in passing, aspects of everyday life that we otherwise might have forgotten to see.

The way I have divided up the book is arbitrary, basically by subject matter rather than by theme, but unlike a regular book of poetry where one eventually reads the whole work, these poems invite random dipping. If some of them give the reader momentary pause, I shall be satisfied. Christopher Levenson