Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • 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.

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. I am in Green Bank,

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it