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.