Just as a note, I Googled the Ammons, and it looks like your memory was slightly off.

Their Sex Life

On failure on
Top of another



------------------
Steve Schroeder

Though I'm not a great fan of W.S. Merwin's Purgatorio translation, I very much like some of his own poems. In addition to writing one of my favorite very long poems (the novel-length The Folding Cliffs), he wrote one of the shortest:


ELEGY

Who would I show it to?


There are also many beautiful translations of short poems in Robert Payne's The White Pony, an anthology of Chinese poetry from the Shih Ching to Mao. It's a wonderful book I'd urge everyone to own, if you can find a copy. Here's a sample, written by Tu Fu and translated by Hsieh Wen Tung:


QUATRAIN

Before you praise spring's advent, note,
What capers the mad wind may cut:
To cast the flowers to the waves
And overturn the fishing boat.

And Gavin Ewart who surely wrote the shortest;

Love Poem

You!

I had one myself which went;

Brewer's Droop

Two failures
Back to Back


Which may, inadvertently, (I was unaware of its existence) owe something to the Ammons.

Jim



[This message has been edited by Jim Hayes (edited November 29, 2003).]

Merwin's "Elegy" is one of the funniest short poems I've ever seen. And Ewart's "Love Poem" is gorgeous.

Correction

Delete ‘Wax Effigy, some Pins, one Witch’.
Insert ‘One Lawyer, one Vindictive Bitch’.

ERIC MILLWARD

I think this is one of the most poignant love poems ever written (by Anon in the early 16th Century):


Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

Regards, Maz

John Ashbery:


The Cathedral Is

Slated for demolition

And one of the Great short poems:


At a Hasty Wedding

If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire
By bonds of every bond the best,
If hours be years. The twain are blest
Do eastern stars slope never west,
Nor pallid ashes follow fire:
If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire.


--Thomas Hardy

I was going to add this to my Cynic's Corner post, but that’s already too long and Cunningham was a modern master of the epigram. Frank

Memoir

Now that he’s famous fame will not elude me:
For 14.95 read how he screwed me.


[24]
Good Fortune, when I hailed her recently,
Passed by me with the intimacy of shame
As one that in the dark had handled me
And could no longer recollect my name.

J.V. Cunningham

Here are several I came across recently when revisiting an anthology edited by Wendy Cope. The first may have been in the back of my mind when Tim Murphy and I started the recent versified jokes fad here at the 'sphere, a craze that culminated in a special issue of "Light."
RPW

A Joke Versified, by Thomas Moore

"Come, come," said Tom's father, "at your time of life,
There's no longer excuse for thus playing the rake --
It is time you should think, boy, of taking a wife."
"Why so it is father -- whose wife shall I take?"


Family Court, by Ogden Nash

One would be in less danger
From the wiles of the stranger
If one's own kin and kith
Were more fun to be with.


The Englishwoman, by Stevie Smith

The Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.


Mrs. Hobson's Choice, by Alma Denny

What shall a woman
Do with her ego
Faced with the choice
That it go or he go?