SHORTEST???

Last week in my poetry class, we learnt a poem from Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool." I think it is the shortest poem we have leanrt in class. "We Real Cool" only has eight lines and each line only has three words, but it gives readers much space to imagine--late afternoon, kids skip school, hang out at the pool and think they are really cool.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

We also did an interesting activity in my poetry class called "boil the poem"--everyone picked a poem he or she wrote and tried to shorten it. The poem of Brooks and the activity we did in class made me wonder--what is the shortest poem in the world?

"Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes", also known simply as "Fleas", is a couplet commonly cited as the shortest documented poem ever written with an unknown author. It is easy to remember because of its perky rhyme, humorous and allusion. Here is the poem:

Fleas

Adam
Had 'em

Some people think "Fleas" should not be the shortest poem because it has two words, but I wonder if one word will still be recognized as a poem. Poems can be as long as an article, or as short as a word. I think long poems can give readers an image of the theme easily and the short poems develop people's imagination. Short poems can actually be harder to write than long poems because authors have to use the least amount of words to express the most thought. I prefer to read short poems and guess what is going on when everything is not obvious.

Here is a link of another two-word short poem "Me, We" from Muhammad Ali.