The Shortest Poems

How short can a poem gets?

photo by krosseel
image from morguefile.com





A haiku, 3 lines, 17 syllables? Ginsberg's American Sentence, 1 sentence, 17 syllables, no more no less. Or a monostitch, a one line poem, usually less than 17 syllables?

Or Strickland Gillilan's couplet "Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes" :

      Adam
      Had 'em.

Seems like the title is longer than the poem.


Or "Ode to a Goldfish", often attributed to Ogden Nash :

      Oh, wet
      pet

Just 3 syllables, my friends.

Or how about this one, just one word "lighght" by Aram Saroyan, which caused a little storm between the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Congress.

Or how about this one, "ly" by Geof Huth? Was he thinking of adverbs when he wrote this?

Or this by Bill Pauly (from The Haiku Handbook) which doesn't even had a word. Do you see the cat on the fence?


And in my opinion, the best shortest poem, if there is such a thing, is by jwcurry. Just a lower case i dotted with his own fingerprint. Like this (done with my own fingerprint, for this illustration).

And from me, just for the fun for this post, 2 "short poems".

Do you see through the Lies?

another visual word from me. and how about this monostich that i wrote at my other blog :

pregnant silence after she said she was.


I know. Our attention span in this internet age is shorter than the power cable on the computer. This post is getting too draggy, so it is time to cut it short. Promise to be back with a longer poem next post. :)


THE
END

(this is not a short poem)

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sometimes, the less said, the better.


Shared on Poetry Pantry #285 at Poets United.

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© cheong lee san ( dsnake1 ) 2016