(Or, 652 words about 1)

In 1965, the world watched with bated breath as a new record was set in the cutthroat arena of minimalist poetry. The incumbent — whose reign had survived unchallenged for nearly half a century — was Strickland Gillilan’s “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes,” sometimes called “Fleas,” consisting of an impressively low count of three words:

Adam
Had ’em

It has meter, it has rhyme, it has a neat little image to drop in your head. Sure looks like a poem to me, chief. Bystanders debated whether the title should be counted — after all, the poem is markedly less comprehensible without it — but in the absence of any other serious candidates for the record, the refs let it slide.

Now, decades passed without any new advancements in the field. Scientists posited that two words were the theoretical limit, which poems can approach but never reach. Specialists in hypothetical literature wrote papers debating whether word count was a misleading metric: “Suppose one were to glue words to one another, in the manner of Germans … one swiftly discovers that one may extend any poem until its semantic meaning is arbitrarily definite … the method of numbering words, unable to reckon with this technique, is naught but a powerful foolishness.” (He goes on to disparage the invasion of Poland, and recommends tallying syllables instead).

All these questions would soon be rendered moot, for the undisputed GOAT was about to debut.

Breaking the barrier

Pulitzer prize-winning author and playwright William Saroyan is not the GOAT of minimalist poetry, but he did have minimalist tendencies, as is evidenced by him eliding the letters ‘b,’ ‘h,’ and ‘a’ when naming his son Aram.

Aram himself was a cool 22 years of age when it happened. His submission was not two words; it was not even two syllables. And it didn’t smuggle anything through the title, either. When the editor of the Chicago Review was asked why he published the poem, he replied he was told to do so by an angel. I reproduce it here in full detail:

lighght

Whether that does it for you or not, I can’t say, but I like it. There’s an instantaneity to a single word alone that a sentence cannot accomplish, and it fits the subject. The unfamiliar spelling forces you to see it anew: the repeated letters are silent yet obvious, mirroring the invisible but revealing role of light itself. It’s neat. It’s elegant.

The National Endowment of the Arts agreed, and selected it for The American Literary Anthology. It was awarded, like every other poem in the collection, 750 dollars (roughly $7,800 today) and Gillilan’s already near-minimal trochaic monometer was replaced by … monosyllabic, or catalectic, or acephalous monometer, something like that. Four syllables with one. The poor thing never had a chance.

But not everyone was a fan; a Republican congressman from Iowa seized upon the poem as an example of frivolous hippie bullshit sustained on the government’s dime. The word wasn’t even spelled correctly! “You are from the Midwest.” replied the grantor, pouring fuel on the fire. “You are culturally deprived, so you would not understand it anyway.” Ronald Reagan derided the poem on campaigns, and vowed to abolish the National Endowment of the Arts (he didn’t).

For the spectators of the sport, the only interesting question was whether you could get any shorter. Saroyan himself tried pushing the limit to the extreme with a single letter poem:

But I think we can agree that this is just egregious. It’s always sad to see an artist resort to self-parody.

Well, it’s sixty years later, and this is where I announce that I myself have composed a poem even shorter than Saroyan’s attempts. I’m confident its record will last as the shortest in history. The maximally minimal. You may hold your applause for the end.

Behold.