poem or compass

North/South/East/West
Poetry’s the compass of respect

—David Giannini, from "42 APHORISTICS," Talisman (Issue #41, 2012)

brief compass

Just as two poems don’t make a single narrative (at best they are related by links between characters or similar elements), so two or more poems don’t make a narrative or formal structure (except as one poem requires another to complete it). The poet’s ambition should be satisfied—as mine in is this collection [Lavorare stanca]—if each poem, in its own brief compass, manages to create a structure of its own.

—Cesare Pavese, “The Poet’s Craft”
Hard Labor, translated by Wm. Arrowsmith (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1979)