06-04-2016, 02:21 PM
I don't know how to use photoshop or whatever, but I'd say I can go even shorter: a comma, but with the squiggly bit at the bottom detached, so that it looks like a period with a bit of dirt below.
I think anything can be a poem, but for something to be a poem, the author must have intended it as such, and the reader must receive it as such --- that is, poetry, to be itself, has to communicate, not just to exist, to be written, to be read. Of course, as for what is good poetry --- and what among these short poems are good --- may be a little harder to define, although I refuse to believe such subjectivity is, in a practical sense, immeasurable. I like the thumbprint one, though, much more than the ly one, if only because it didn't look like someone just messed up on the typewriter --- it looked more deliberate --- if I had read it without such prompting, I would have more readily appreciated it, at least as another form of art. But then that's another question: what differentiates poetry from other media?