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extreme brevity

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The poetic principle of expressing maximum meaning in minimal words

Detailed Definition
Extreme brevity is a poetic principle emphasizing radical concision—often reducing a poem to a single line, phrase, or even word—to maximize impact through minimalism; rooted in haiku, aphorism, and concrete poetry, it relies on implication, silence, and reader participation to complete the aesthetic and emotional circuit.
Example
Example in poetry:
Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (2 lines); Aram Saroyan’s one-word poem “lighght”; “Fog” by Carl Sandburg (6 lines); “Haiku” by Richard Wright: “Whitecaps on the bay: / A broken signboard banging / In the April wind.”
Additional Notes
Extreme brevity characterizes poems of just a few words or lines (e.g., haiku, epigrams), relying on implication, silence, and precision; it demands careful word choice and trusts reader inference.
Also Known As
Ultra-concision minimal utterance sparse lyric haiku brevity Laconism
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