2026 Best of Brevitas Anthology of the Short Poem

Brevitas was conceived in a noisy Grand Central bar in 2002, the idea shouted across split pea soup and scrawled on smudged napkins. Steve Zeitlin and Jim Pignetti were searching for a way for poets to work and share and grow online. We scrawled hubs and spokes on the napkins, arrows pointing in every direction -figuring who would send poems to whom and how to respond. The scrawls were cryptic, and lost to landfill, but soon Brevitas was ablaze with meter and metaphor. Brevitas is a laboratory, a factory, a gallery, a temple.

Brevitas mixes metric elixirs, brews metaphors, stanzas hiss and bubble. Brevitas crates poetry, ready for shipment.

We share online, twice a month. A poem or two, under 14 lines. Short poetry circulates around our email circle -everyone sees the widget, the baby, the poem. There are oohs and ahhs. Some say, Wow! Bravo! There's criticism too. Fix that line. Rough transition, How can you end like that?! Often, there's just silence. We gather once a year to assemble this work on paper, we toss these poems against the wall, we shout them out.

- Jim Pignetti

A group poem by Steve Zeitlin & Brevitarians Bob Holman, Hal Sirowitz, Flash Rosenberg, Jan Emerson, Susanna Lee, inspiration from Donald Hall - in honor of the Brevitas poetry collective.

brevitas - the short of it

because there's no string so short it's not worth saving because this poem is already too long

because attention spans are shortening bread because a raindrop is as wet as an ocean

because a sonnet is too long and a haiku too short because short poems have a shape

because long poems crowd the page

because cutting lines is a shave and a haircut because we get the short end of the stick

because it's not the long but the short of it

because a raindrop is tiny as a tear

because you want to leave them wanting more because the end is always near