Pills, posts and jokes: conciseness as the ethos of Brazilian poetry

Abstract This paper aims to analyze the origin and the development of the short poem in Brazilian literature, from its precursors in nineteenth century to its spread usage nowadays. Such poetic succinctness is usually associated to humor, and was called, in Modernism, as “joke”, “pill” and “minute” poetry. Thanks to its wide propagation, it became a kind of recurrent genre in Brazilian poetry, not in an undisputed way, though. Its reading experience differs to the traditional verse´s one since it is fluid and immediately comprehensible, as a “flash” that destabilizes the usual speech of everyday usefulness and captures the reader in a cathartic instant by causing the laughter and/or the perception of its rebellious conceptual value, which is inherent to the “joke poems”. As possible manifestations, the concrete poem, the “marginal generation” and poetry posted in current social networks are investigated.