The Shortest Poem in The World | Aram Saroyan
SE01E18
It’s the world’s shortest poem and it looks like the consequence of sex between two identical smallcase versions of the letter m. Either that or the letters n and m may have had sex and this might have been its product.
This is an approximate replica of Aram Saroyan's four-legged triple humped m. This is not the actual image of his poem. I do not own copyrights to this image. I've made it available here for the purposes of critical appreciation and analysis. Take a look at it right away. I’ve made it available as an image in the shownotes. Take a look. Or just Google “Aram Saroyan” the poet who wrote it and “shortest poem”. What do you see? More importantly, what do you think?
Well, now that you know what it is—or more appropriately—what it looks like, let me ask you do you see any meaning in it?
Take a while to think about that. What is it about this thing that makes it a poem in the first place? What do you think?
Well, as I see it, all I can do is just look at it and not even so much as pronounce it (I have no idea how it is pronounced, anyway.). So this, to me, morphs into a photograph. Now that, in turn, begs the question: what do I see in this photograph then? What does it mean?
Time of recording: Sometime during the afternoon
Mood: You don’t want to know
Well, frankly speaking, it looks deformed and that brings back some rather painful memories. It reminded me of an old woman I knew way back in the 80s. Back then, I was what a conservative Catholic auntie would call a very decent holy Catholic. I used to go to church every day and every day, I saw this poor old woman sitting in one of the first few benches near the altar. She was old, of course; and her spine was bent permanently at an angle that left her head just a few feet away from her knees. In other words, she was a hunchback. Much much later, I got to know her sons used to beat her and I’m not quite sure about this bit, but rumour has it that they had also thrown her out of the house.
Then it reminded me of my—well how do I say this—well, fuck it I’ll say it. It reminds me of my right hand: I had broken it in a fall in my childhood; it was then put back together of course; but not that well and now it’s fused. It’s a frozen shoulder. You see, I wouldn’t allow anyone to know of my deformity in school, college, and even at workplaces. I never talked about it and I did my best to hide it. And all of that shows how deformed I am. I just wanted to hide. Actually, I wanted to protect myself. I was that insecure.
Time of recording: Night time
Mood: Thirsty, horny or whatever you want to call that kind of mood.
You know, come to think of it now that I look at it, those mounds over there—they do remind me of asses I have seen in a porn movie—in all configurations. So, well, this seems like quite a sophisticated representation of an orgy! Haha!
I realize I have two different interpretations of this four-legged m because of my moods. And right now, I’m wondering whether the poet was ever interested in infusing any meaning into it at all.
Bob Grumman—or Grumman (I’m not quite sure how the name is pronounced.)—who was a mathematical poet and an admirer of Saroyan’s work, said that the poem takes us smack dab into the heart of an alphabet that is beginning to come to life between the letters m and n. Well, that’s the opposite of what I thought it to be: the finished product of sex between the two. And that only goes to show how diverse interpretations can be.
Bob also went on to say that it reminded him of how a doubled u could become a w. He also termed it a pun for the word, "am.” According to Bob, it alluded to some sort of “superior, or perhaps gross, state of being—an "am" times one-and-a-half.”
As for Saroyan himself, well, I looked high and low and through all that was available on the Internet about him and found nothing attributed as his insight into the poem.
Perhaps he didn’t associate any meaning with it at all. Perhaps, it was all satire, you know: he mocking us and our need or urge to find meaning in everything. You know how people are. There has to be something behind everything, usually. Why was the curtain blue? Why wasn’t it red? Why did she wear red shoes? Why not black? Why couldn’t he have said brown bread? Why not pink bread? etc., etc.—so on and so forth.
Also, I realize I am spending a whole lot of time trying to find meaning in this poem simply because it has been written by a distinguished poet. Aram Saroyan is a distinguished poet. He taught the Master of Professional Writing Program for 15 years at the University of Southern California. He has been published in the New York Times magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Village Voice, the Nation; and the Poetry Society of America awarded one of his collections, which is titled Complete Minimal Poems the William Carlos Williams award in 2008.
So, yes, he’s distinguished; and I understand that his style is more along the lines of concrete poetry—a kind of poetry that is often considered visual poetry in which the typographical effect is very central to the aspect of conveying meaning rather than the verbal characteristic of the words that have been used in that sort of poetry.
Consequently, I find it impossible to entertain the idea of him writing something that is bereft of any meaning whatsoever.
Would I have spent so much of time on it were someone unknown to have written it? No! I probably would not even have featured it here. Which means the poem gets to be considered as one with a meaning and gets traction because of the heft and agency of its creator. Otherwise, it’s just plain nothing.
Now, you see, that, in turn, makes me wonder how many such poems might I have dismissed because their poets were unknown or weren’t decorated enough to make a mark on readers such as me. You know, I’m this close to considering myself a hypocrite right now. And this introspection I’m having right now curiously ties in with what Bob Grumman (or Grumman) had to say of the poem: that, and I quote, “it comes cross as a pun for the word, ‘am,’ to suggest some kind of superior, or perhaps gross, state of being--an ‘am’ times one-and-a-half.”
It so turns out that a few days later, after recording what you just heard, I did manage to get in touch with Aram Saroyan via Instagram and I asked him what prompted him to write this one-letter poem.
Well, Saroyan says that the triple humped m—as he calls it—dates back to 1965; that’s way before word processors would allow you to correct errors before printing. Saroyan had a job at a typing service in Manhattan and worked at "paste-ups" where one would fix a typo by cutting it out of the copy and pasting in a suitable correction. Now one afternoon there was a job with a big m in it and it occurred to Saroyan that he could paste an extra hump on it, and voila! The bigger m was born.*
With regards to the meaning of the poem, Saroyan says that it really is a matter of how one perceives it, and he’s sure there are a lot of different ideas there.* Well, I couldn’t agree more on that with Saroyan. There are there will be, in the days to come.
Now, let’s talk about the record that the poem holds. As I said before, it’s called the shortest poem in the world—or to be very specific, it’s described as being cited in the Guinness Book of Worlds Records as the shortest poem in the world. Now that very claim foxed me and I’ll tell you why.
Bob Grumman (or Bob Grumman—I’m not quite sure of the pronunciation even now.)—he himself says the claim made by the Guinness Book of World Records may be incorrect because a certain jwcurry wrote an even shorter one—an interpretation of the letter i. In it, the letter i has jwcurry’s fingerprint as its dot, thereby making it unique and providing acres and acres of room for it being an interpretation of the self, of one’s own identity, personality and so on and so forth.
Also, almost every article and blog post that talks about the poem says that the poem has been cited as the shortest poem in the world by The Guinness Book. But none of them provide a link back to the actual record in the Guinness Book itself. Which I found a little unusual since The Guinness Book of World Records does have a website—a searchable one. So, I went ahead and looked for it on that website and guess what? I found nothing. I found the longest ever poem, I found the shortest crane, but neither the poem nor anything of the shortest poem as even a record turned up in my searches.
Again, I asked Saroyan himself and he was kind enough to clear it all. Saroyan says he was privy to the citation in the Guinness Book way back in the 70s. Then a whole lot of controversy followed; several other shortest poems were cited; and finally the the Guinness Book decided to eliminate the category of the shortest poem in its entirety.*
Saroyan says he also recollects that at one point in time, the Guinness Book listed his poem titled Blod (B-L-O-D) as the shortest poem.
So, clearly there have been other miniature poems. There have been other attempts at brandishing a world of meaning into something very teeny tiny; in fact so many, that the category itself had to be abolished by the Guinness Book of World Records, but I can say this for sure: the four-legged m, or as Aram Saroyan calls it the triple humped m, is one of the few that captivates, fascinates, and arrests your attention simply because it marries two letters; and the simplicity of that marriage perplexes you more than enough into trying to find some meaning, some worth in that unconventional weird little marriage of those two letters. Simple, but unconventional it sure is.
That brings me to the end of this episode, which is Episode 18, of I Could Think of Verse: a podcast about poems in all shapes and sizes.
Do remember to join me in the next episode, which is Episode 19, in which I’ll be talking about a poem that I encountered way way back in school. Until then, this is me Garfield saying goodbye, God bless, and stay safe.
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Background Score:
Dunes: Pixabay | Amber: VYEN | Dream by Dreams: Monument_Music (Pixabay) | On the Island: Godmode | Sound Effects: Garfield Francisco Dsouza and Pixabay
Footnotes:
*Inputs from my correspondence via Instagram with Aram Saroyan. Almost all of Saroyan’s responses have been used verbatim. I’ve merely rephrased a bit to align it with the narrative style I use for this podcast.
References:
Huth, Geof. “Measuring the World’s Shortest Poem”. dbqp: visualizing poetics. Jun 12, 2007. http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2007/06/measuring-worlds-shortest-poem.html
Huth, Geof. “The Smallest Poem”. dbqp: visualizing poetics. Feb 29, 2004. http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2004/02/smallest-poem.html
Grumman, Bob. “MNMLST POETRY: Unacclaimed but Flourishing”. Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry. 1997. https://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm
“Aram Saroyan”. Wikipedia.org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aram_Saroyan
“Saroyan, Aram 1943-“. Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/saroyan-aram-1943
Saroyan, Aram. “NOTES AT SEVENTY”. Granish.com. Dec. 25, 2013. http://granish.com/aram-saroyan-notes-at-seventy/
“Award Winners | William Carlos Williams Award - 2008 | Aram Saroyan”. Poetry Society of America. https://poetrysociety.org/award-winners/2008-book-awards-for-publishers/william-carlos-williams-award