In one of my posts yesterday, I reposted an item from Futility Closet. Titled “Taking Literary Minimalism to Its Endpoint” [https://academeblog.org/2014/04/19/6702/] it included this lead:

“In 1965 poet Aram Saroyan wrote a poem consisting of a single word, lighght. George Plimpton included it in the American Literary Anthology, and Saroyan received a $500 cash award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Perhaps to mock this, in 1972 Dave Morice published Matchbook, a literary magazine whose inch-square pages were stapled inside working matchbooks. Edited by the fictional Joyce Holland, each issue featured nine one-word poems submitted by contributors.”

That post then provided a sample list of those Matchbook issues.

This item, also uncovered by Futility Closet, takes that item one step further—to a poem without any words, at least beyond its title. And the extra attraction for the readers of this blog is that the item was originally published in Academe.

“Socrates Among the Athenians”

 

– Louis Phillips, Academe, February 1979

 

_________________________

 

The items posted to Academe Blog from Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com) are re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains that site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning.

______________

My previous re-posts from Futility Closet have included:

“But Should It Cound toward Promotion and Tenure”: https://academeblog.org/2013/05/21/but-would-it-count-toward-promotion-and-tenure/

“Another Item of Ironic Scholarship from Futility Closet”: https://academeblog.org/2013/05/26/another-item-on-ironic-scholarship-from-futility-closet/

“Odd Library Subject Headings”: https://academeblog.org/2013/06/03/odd-library-subject-headings/

“Herein Lies Another Route to Madness”: https://academeblog.org/2013/06/07/herein-lies-yet-another-route-to-madness/

“How-To Books That Make One Wonder Why”: https://academeblog.org/2013/06/18/how-to-books-that-make-one-wonder-why/

“Higher Ed’s Version of the Great Imposter”: https://academeblog.org/2013/06/20/higher-eds-version-of-the-great-impostor/

“ A Significant Portion of Someone’s Life Was Devoted to Writing Each of These Books”: https://academeblog.org/2013/08/26/a-significant-portion-of-someones-life-was-devoted-to-writing-each-of-these-books/

“Making Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow a Little Less Mundane”: https://academeblog.org/2013/08/19/making-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow-a-little-less-mundane/

“Parsing the Paradoxical Nature of Politics”: https://academeblog.org/2013/12/09/parsing-the-paradoxical-nature-of-politics/

“The Pyramid Cemetery”: https://academeblog.org/2013/12/23/the-pyramid-cemetery-a-historical-anecdote-with-the-resonance-of-a-parable/

“How to Make the Case for an Article’s Publication”: https://academeblog.org/2013/12/27/how-to-make-the-case-for-an-articles-publication/#more-5380

“Plagiarism and Cryptomnesia”: https://academeblog.org/2014/01/02/plagiarism-and-cryptomnesia/