I have a little Attention Defi... what?
Lost my focus, I can't see

Not quite done with A
Now I'm moving on to Z

I cannot master anything
My interest starts to shift

I know a little bit of everything
Believe me, not a gift

If only I could focus
I'm afraid that isn't me

I might still have a chance
If I can master OCD

The Top Ten Epigrams of All Time

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.—Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.—Catherine the Great

If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and his impersonators would be dead.—Johnny Carson

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde

To err is human, but it feels divine.—Mae West

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.—Mohandas Gandhi

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.—Virginia Woolf

I'm not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb, and also I'm not blonde.—Dolly Parton

He does not believe, who does not live according to his belief.—Sigmund Freud



In April 2014 A Poet’s Glossary by Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch was published. As Hirsch writes in the preface, “this book—one person’s work, a poet’s glossary—has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its classical, romantic, and modern movements, its various outlying groups, its small devices and large mysteries—how it works.” Each week we will feature a term and its definition from Hirsch’s new book.

epigram: From the Greek epigramma, “to write upon.” An epigram is a short, witty poem or pointed saying. Ambrose Bierce defined it in The Devil’s Diction­ary (1881–1911) as “a short, sharp saying in prose and verse.” In Hellenistic Greece (third century B.C.E.), the epigram developed from an inscription carved in a stone monument or onto an object, such as a vase, into a literary genre in its own right. It may have developed out of the proverb. The Greek Anthology (tenth century, fourteenth century) is filled with more than fifteen hundred epigrams of all sorts, including pungent lyrics on the pleasures of wine, women, boys, and song.

Ernst Robert Curtius writes in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953): “No poetic form is so favorable to playing with pointed and sur­prising ideas as epigram—for which reason seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany called it ‘Sinngedicht.’ This development of the epigram necessarily resulted after the genre ceased to be bound by its original defi­nition (an inscription for the dead, for sacrificial offerings, etc.).” Curtius relates the interest in epigrams to the development of the “conceit” as an aesthetic concept.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the epigram in epigrammatic form (1802):

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity and wit its soul.

The pithiness, wit, irony, and sometimes harsh tone of the English epigram derive from the Roman poets, especially Martial, known for his caustic short poems, as in 1.32 (85–86 B.C.E.): “Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why? / Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

The epigram is brief and pointed. It has no particular form, though it often employs a rhymed couplet or quatrain, which can stand alone or serve as part of a longer work. Here is Alexander Pope’s “Epigram from the French” (1732):

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Geoffrey Hartman points out that there are two diverging traditions of the epigram. These were classified by J. C. Scaliger as mel and fel (Poetics Libri Septem, 1561), which have been interpreted as sweet and sour, sugar and salt, naïve and pointed. Thus Robert Hayman, echoing Horace’s idea that poetry should be both “dulce et utile,” sweet and useful, writes in Quodlibets (1628):

Short epigrams relish both sweet and sour,
Like fritters of sour apples and sweet flour.

The “vinegar” of the epigram was often contrasted with the “honey” of the sonnet, especially the Petrarchan sonnet, though the Shakespearean sonnet, with its pointed final couplet, also combined the sweet with the sour. “By a natural development,” Hartman writes, “since epigram and sonnet were not all that distinct, the pointed style often became the honeyed style raised to a higher power, to preciousness. A new opposition is frequently found, not between sugared and salty, but between pointed (precious, over­written) and plain.”

The sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and sometimes sweet-and-sour epigram has been employed by contemporary American formalists, such as Howard Nemerov, X. J. Kennedy, and especially J. V. Cunningham. Here is a two-line poem that Cunningham translated in 1950 from the Welsh epi­grammatist John Owen (1.32, 1606):

Life flows to death as rivers to the sea,
And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

Excerpted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



collected in
collection
A Poet’s Glossary
Each week we feature a new term from Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch’...

She was everything I ever wanted.
Her euphoria as contagious as the common flu
Her warm and cozy feeling like a hug you give to your stuffed teddy bear
Her laughter as colorful as a Monet painting
Her tender hands just like a fawn
She was everything my brain desired to have

Immediately I wanted her all the time
Every Second
Every Minute
Every Hour
Every time the hand on the clock moves
She was all I ever desir—

Wait…
I forgot something
Let me start over.

I have ADHD
… at least I think I do
Look for me in the classroom staring off the window
Because I was either suddenly interested in the conversation between two passers-by about their finals
Or perhaps a baby bird flew by the window sill
Look for me at my own home frantically flipping off
Because for the one hundred and twenty-seventh time, I’ve lost my own phone
Sit beside me? Sure! Why not?
IMeanIt’sNotLikeI’mCompletelyQuietButI’mReallyAFunPersonToBe­WithBecauseIHaveSoMuchStori—
Sorry about that…
But… give me a task and I’ll be eager to do it
But in a count of three, I’ll magically fall asleep within the couch because…

What did you told me again?

Anyways...
Do you still remember that day?
The one at our science laboratory?
I met you.
You still had braces on
I saw it peeking when you smiled at me as I told a joke to you
You still had long straight hair back then
You were the typical school nerd
But I never told you that because I didn’t want that smiling face to fade

And to think… your face was one of the things I focused on
Our first meeting was something I somehow remembered
And to think you made me go silent for a while
Every day, I was a busy ocean
I would often have big and small waves dancing around my head
But the moment I saw your face
I was the quietest stream…

You were everything I ever wanted
You had everything I have always daydreamed about
You became the reason I give a great amount of eye contact when striking a conversation
You became the reason I spoke less words than I did back then
You made me not forget about the assignments we had because we’d do it together.
You made me not get distracted by the tick of the clo—

The clock.
The ticking clock.
The clock that dictates the time.
Time.
Time we have left together like this.
Suddenly, everything was about us for me.
I didn’t know how I can keep you to myself

I wrote you letters
I sang songs that reminded me of you
I followed you wherever you went
I tried to make up for the lost time we’ll have

And I’m sorry.
I got everything in my head.
Stupid impulses.

I wanted to change for you.
To stop my disorder for you
I stopped listening to my classes just thinking of you
I forgot about the pieces of paperwork
I get distracted by the clock.

And suddenly I went back to staring at clouds out the window again
Just like you.
You went away with them.

Our times spent.
The laughter we shared.
And the three words I wanted to tell you.

What were those again?
Sorry, I could be forgetful sometimes too.