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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.