The world's shortest new poem is bornIt consists of three characters: an apostrophe between two blank spaces. It is called an apostrophe between two silences, a much longer title and necessarily so to help give meaning to three graphic signs, two of which are not even visible. Theauthor is Lorenzo Mullon, born in Trieste (class of 1961), Venetian by adoption (after a long period in Milan), poet in (not di) road and a in the street which evokes both the place where one is and the movement, the journey, the march towards continuous change.
Before telling the story of the birth of this literary micro-work, who is Mullon and what is his poetics, Let's answer three preliminary questions: How short can a poem be? Is brevity a quality of the composition? And what artistic sense does it make to ask these questions?
We answer in reverse order, well aware that we are walking on thin ice. Artistically it makes no sense to think about the length of a poetic text, both because it is in no way decisive for its value or its success and because it is part of the author's freedom of choice. The same poet can prefer a shorter or longer length depending on what he wants to communicate, and on the method he deems most appropriate to use. Emily Dickinson he wrote both short and longer poems. Dante Alighieri He used short sonnets for his youthful love lyrics, and composed the Divine Comedy which consists of 14.233 verses, 96 thousand words and 400 thousand letters, not counting the spaces.
On the other hand, in painting we have the almost miniaturist masterpiece St. Jerome in his study di Antonello da Messina ( , his son Jacobello called it) and the broad features of the Guernica di Picasso and the gigantic and scenographic Wedding at Cana di Paolo Veronese, and no one can evaluate them based on their size, only express a preference for one or the other.
The hidden meaning behind brevity
La brevity can be, instead, a quality of the poetic composition, in the double sense of characterizing it and giving it a dazzling thickness. Like the No. di Franco Fortini, of a polemical nature and which loses value if extrapolated from the contrast with Charles Bo. Especially the I light up with immense di Giuseppe Ungaretti, which competes with It's like/in autumn/on the trees/the leaves of the same Ungaretti, while less synthetic but no less dense is Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth/pierced by a ray of sun:/ and suddenly it is evening. by Salvatore Quasimodo (for a brief review-classification of the shortest poems, see Straight thread).
Brevity is a characteristic feature of the Japanese Haikus and among the most beautiful we choose The temple bell is silent,/but the sound continues/to come from the flowers di Matsuo Bashō, What a moon:/the thief/stops to sing by Yosa Buson and The roof burned down:/now/I can see the moon by Mizuta Masahide.
The brevity of a poem meets the expressive limit in the minimum number of characters essential to express a concept in the language in which it is written. In fact, up to now theto a shorter poem internationally recognized is that of Aram Saroyan, written in 1965 and composed of three visible characters: an M with four bars enclosed between corporals, type and in fact it reads, according to some interpreters, as I am, desperate cry of the self, like theMen of the opening chorus of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. John Passion. The point is that the quadrupedal M does not exist in the alphabet and is therefore pure invention, even pictorial, like a visual poem, or, in this case, in-visive.
Mullon and Poetry as an Invisible Sign
THEwork by Mullon It is closely related to Saroyan's: it is made of sign, rather than words, and it is equally in-visible, because any form of writing (manual, typewritten, digital) does not allow the two spaces that enclose the apostrophe to be traced. Therefore they cannot even be read, but can only be described: they are there even if they cannot be seen.
Almost a reader's act of faith in the author, who narrates that: .
So, an iphotographic image gave the inspiration to Mullon. On the other hand, Lorenzo spends most of his days in the streets and squares of Venice, meeting people, talking to them and, in exchange for an offering, giving them the booklets he has created by hand (in the cover, in the composition, in the binding), which contain mini-collections of his poems, all of them short (even if not as short as the one described here). Above all, they are full of food for the mind, substance to imagine and dream, as Shakespeare would have said: "We too are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our brief life is encircled with a sleep".
Ps: one can discuss whether spaces are characters of the text, like letters, numbers and punctuation marks. I am convinced that they are, and not only for a functional question (allowing the deciphering-reading of the sequence of signs), as well as a physical one (it clutters up, even digital memories, like graphic elements), but also because white space takes on a particular value in poetic texts as it isolates, giving greater prominence to what the eye sees, and therefore striking the mind.
