[Maryann Corbett]

I've just checked out of the library Phyllis McGinley's Times Three, the closest thing she's got to a collected. It includes a grouping called "A Gallery of Elders." Here are a few highlights:

The Old Politician

Toward caution all his lifetime bent,
Straddler and compromiser, he
Becomes a public monument
To sheer longevity.

The Old Radical

The burning cause that lit his days
When he was younger came to harm.
Now Hate's impoverished charcoal blaze
Is all that keeps him warm.

The Old Philanthropist

His millions make museums bright;
Harvard anticipates his will;
While his young typist weeps at night
Over a druggist's bill.

[Erik Olson]

The Bedbug
(Set in Communist Prague)

Comrade, with your finger on the playback switch,
Listen carefully to each love-moan,
And enter in the file which cry is real, and which
A mere performance for your microphone.

-Tony Harrison

[David Rosenthal]

Bob, I am glad to see you are still hanging out with Salty Balty. That is if my assumption is correct that this is your own translation. I like what you've done with the final line.

David R.

[David Rosenthal]

Has anyone put this one in yet:



Oh God of dust and rainbows, help us see
that without dust the rainbow would not be.

-- Langston Hughes



David R.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Nope, hadn't heard that one, David. Good to see you here, btw!

Here are two by Robert Francis:

Prescription

Whoever would be clean
Of cluttering desire
Must scrap the golden mean
And bed with frost or fire.

Only two ways to cure
The old itching disease:
No middle temperature
But only burn or freeze.

Exemplary

They never ask for more
Or ever lose their poise
Never a slammed door
Never a needless noise.

For slander a deaf ear
So faultlessly well bred
Gossip they seldom hear
The deferential dead.

[Gail White]

Bruce Bennett has a number of epigrams scattered throughout his books.

Here's one:

ON BEING INSTRUCTED TO SEND ON A CHAIN LETTER

A chance to have FIVE readers? Friendly too?
The chain be hanged! I send this poem to you.


This may not exactly be an epigram, but it's a favorite of mine:

THE GARDEN

I'm going out to mash a slug or two.
They're wasting my tomatoes, oozing slime
On everything I own. I think it's time
The bastards learned a lesson. You come too.

[Jan D. Hodge]

My Wife Reads the Paper at Breakfast on the Birthday of the Scottish Poet


Poet Burns to be Honored, the headline read.
She put it down. "They found you out," she said.

--Miller Williams

[Julie Steiner]

SNORT! Good one!

[Andrew Frisardi]

Yeah, good one there, Jan.

Looking back, I'm pretty sure the Robert Francis poems I posted yesterday aren't really epigrams. They're short and epigrammatic but not really epigrams. On the other hand, Gail says one of the ones she posted isn't one, but it sure seems like one to me.

Any thoughts on what makes a short poem an epigram, or not?

[Max Goodman]

The poems that feel most epigrammatic to me encapsulate statements--ideally, of course, intriguing and true-feeling statements.

Poems that, additionally, incorporate turns, whose endings, despite the poems' brevity, contradict their openings, feel more epigrammatic.