Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. I am in Green Bank,
West Virginia. Pocahontas County. And my favorite word
is ...
I learned it from Big Bird and it's not so much a word
as the alphabet, if you try to pronounce it
like a word. It's a neat trick, almost poetic.
But what counts as poetry? How short can something be and still be
a poem? What is the shortest poem
in the world and why does knowing it
matter?
Okay, now I am in Charlottesville, Virginia
in a hotel room. I'm on the road this week.
Take a look at my amazingly fancy
set up. A popular contender for the shortest
story in the world is apocryphally
attributed to Ernest Hemingway. It contains only six
words. "For sale. Baby shoes.
Never worn." A popular contender for the title of world's
shortest poem and the one honored at WorldsShortestPoem.com
is a clever couplet attributed to Strickland
Gillilan, titled "on the Antiquity
of Microbes" or sometimes just
"Fleas". It goes like this: " 'Fleas' /
Adam / Had 'em" But shorter
rhyming couplets are possible. Gyles Brandreth
wrote the very cute "Ode to a Goldfish."
"Oh, wet / pet"
Muhammad Ali composed an even shorter rhyming couplet when he spoke at Harvard
in 1975. Using just
4 letters, his poem poignantly sums up the power of
role models and leaders. The idea that as one man climbs
the rest are lifted up. The poem is simply
"me / we"
But a poem doesn't need to rhyme
or contain multiple words. A poem is simply a type of literary
art that uses aesthetic or rhythmic properties of a language to mean
more than it normally would. With that definition in mind take a look at my
favorite
one word poem by Aram Saroyan.
The word light with an extra
"gh". The poem became controversial because the
NEA paid him $500
for the poem. Critics berated it for its simplicity
but that only made it more famous and popular.
Lighght. It's fun to type and it's fun to say because
what sound does the "gh" in the word "light"
really make? Is this a lighter,
fluffier extended version of light or is it a
gargled, choking one? We can get shorter
one letter poems. Two of my favorites are
" 'fit' / n" and
" 'nought' / t". Of course,
should the title count when measuring the length
of a poem? Well, maybe.
I like Geof Huth's two letter amalgam poem.
The letter L with the letter Y on top of it, making a brand new character.
Now, of course an L and a Y is a great way to make an
adverb. It's the difference between strange and strangely.
Here, in this very poem, we have the difference between
you and what you do in one
simple shape. Before they stopped
tracking the record, the Guinness Book of World Records considered Aram Saroyan
the
author of the world's shortest poem.
Here it is. The letter "m"
with an extra hump. Is it
a letter or an image? Some have called it
a close up of an alphabet being born.
Its cells still in the process of dividing the
"m" and the "n", not quite separated. But from what I've read,
in my opinion, the shortest poem
ever, the shortest use of language aesthetically, arhythmically to mean more
than the word itself
is jwcurry's composition of the lower case letter
"i", dotted with his own
fingerprint. The fingerprint makes it
his. "I" means me
but this one can only mean him.
For fun, let's talk about situations in which language
isn't even used. We are entering the realm
of poetry. What Geof Huth calls
a moment when a writer writes
nothing instead of anything.
R. W. Watkins composed a poem
that only suggested language.
In reality, it simply contained places
where language could go. There are also plenty of
empty musical compositions. Songs
that are nothing, simply silence. John Denver even composed one.
His "Ballad of Richard Nixon" is silence
and you can buy it in the iTunes Store for 99 cents.
But who cares? Is knowing the world's shortest poem
just a neat piece of trivia, a cool thing to tell your friends but in the end
a useless pub fact? I mean,
the Guinness Book of World Records has stopped compiling records for
artistic briefness. What you're about to see is possibly
the shortest concert ever
put on. It was done by the White Stripes in Newfoundland in 2007.
Here it comes.
And there it went. That's all.
The Guinness Book of World Records refused to recognize
that concert as being the shortest because they said, quote,
"The nature of competing to make something
the 'shortest' by its very nature trivializes the activity
being carried, as such we have been forced to cease listing records for the
shortest song,
shortest poem and indeed the shortest concert."
Trivializes? Maybe.
But we can say and sing and write and draw a lot of powerful
things, regardless of what authority recognizes
its size or lack thereof. Appreciating the power carried by
even the tiniest poem is a great way to put into perspective just how
cool that is. When he died,
Fernando Pessoa left behind a chest
full of his thoughts and experiences written down.
Decades after his death they were published into "The Book
of Disquiet." His thoughts and experiences
didn't die along with him, he had written them down, he had narrated them
and in this book he discusses the power of narration
compared to simply existing, living,
seeing, YOLO-ing. He said,
"Direct experience is an evasion,
a hiding place for those without any
imagination. To narrate is to create,
while to live is merely
to be lived." Anyone can live
a life. His question would be what have you said
about it. Even the world's shortest
poem is still a comment, a narration.
Even the world's shortest poem, even
a silence that's purposeful and means something
can be mind-blowingly gigantic.