[John Whitworth]

May I alert Spherians to similar poems by Apollinaire - in French!

Actually the one I found seems to be in Arabic. Here's one by Edwin Morgan in Hungarian.

Siesta of a Hungarian Snake

Z sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs ZS zs zs z

[Janice D. Soderling]

John, actually that Edwin Morgan poem starts with s not with Z. (Boldfacing mine.)

At least it is so given in the collection "Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems" edited by Simon Armitage.

I hope you will agree with me that this typo alters the entire way the poem is interpreted, whether the snake is really snoring (horkolás)
or is afflicted with a personality disorder személyiséqzavar. The Uralic languages (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian being the main ones) are never easy.

[Michael Cantor]

This had me a bit confused at first, Janice, and then I realized that you probably meant személyiségzavar. I'm sure John would agree with me.

[Orwn Acra]

One should note that the s, as Janice has it, is lowercased and that the uppercased letters come in the middle. Since a siesta follows lunch, the snake has probably fallen asleep after a big meal (which is the whole joke: the z's of sleep blended with the fricatives of Hungarian); the capital letters indicate a bulging stomach, perhaps.

No English-language poet wrote better concrete poems than Morgan. They are extremely layered and intelligent. I have just acquired Starryveldt, a limited-run booklet of some of his experimental poems of the early 60s. I cannot get over this one, which cannot be found in the Collected:

Original Sin at the Water-Hole

asp
aspon
aspontaneousobstreperousos
tentatiousstentorianosmos
isofhys
tericallysnortingpossesofs
portingshehippopotamusses
pottingalittlefloatin
pottingalittlefloating
pottingalittlefloatingasp!

[Janice D. Soderling]

Rats!

Michael, I was writing in dialect. This is a rural variant. As Walter notes s/he has just consumed a meal consisting (probably) of four rats.

[Julie Steiner]

On the subject of poems featuring typography...sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when I was young and impressionable, I read this in Reader's Digest:

Pretty Mary donned her skates,
Upon the ice to frisk.
Wasn't she a silly girl,
Her little * ?

I also recall seeing (more recently, in a book of light verse) a series of quatrains traded back and forth by a couple of small-circulation American newspapers, featuring all sorts of typographical oddities (ampersands, double daggers, pointing hands) in rhyming positions. I think the topic of the poems was a news item about a donkey. Does this ring any bells with anyone? (Or ding any bats?)

Julie
Older and Still Impressionable (at least partially)

PS--Oh, and there's this centuries-old puzzle poem, too, which leaves out some much-needed punctuation.
http://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.co...-favorite.html
It annoyed me for years because it was printed in several anthologies of children's verse without explanation, and I'm sorry to say that I sorely required the explanation. Which I stumbled across only about ten years ago. The link above includes it. You're welcome.

[John Whitworth]

Michael I always agree with you. It is much the best way. Julie, thank you. I lost the s. Orwn, Morgan's Collected Poems (1990) cost me £14.95 and well worth the money. 600 pages! I expect it is cheaper on Amazon.

£11.24 + £2.80 but that's in the UK. Might be cheaper from a bookshop unless it's out of print.