You may have noticed that a few of my poems have really long titles, and really short bodies. If you've studied poetry at all, you may also have noticed that the bodies of these poems are always haiku, a Japanese form of poetry consisting of a line of 5 syallbles, a line of 7 syllables, and another line of 5 syllables. And if you're a really die-hard student of poetry, you may even point out that they aren't really haiku, because a haiku is, strictly speaking, a poem attempting to capture the essence of a single moment in nature. Instead, these poems are in fact "senryu", another form of Japanese poetry with exactly the same syllabic form as haiku, but not with the requirement that they be about nature.
But if you're enough of a poetry student to know that, and you still haven't lost interest in these poems for being shallow and juvenile, then you're probably just me, checking out my own web-page, or else I'm reading this over your shoulder as I show you my web-page, and you're trying to be polite. In the off chance that neither one of these is true, I should explain about these poems.
These poems are a form of poetry I have invented, called the Aaronagram. Admittedly, I didn't think to call them a form of poetry until after my close friend Steve Gomez wrote a couple of poems in the same format as my poem, A Poem Based on the Idea that the Title is a Lot Longer than the Actual Poem, Which May Seem Like a Pretty Weak Concept, But, Hey, I had Writer's Block at the Time. C'mon, Let's See You Do Better, You Hypocrite. Anyhow, This Haiku, Well, Actually, It's a Senryu, Was True When I Wrote It, But Of Course Now It's a Little Off, Well, Actually It's Off By About Six Months Off. Oh, Whoops, I'm Rambling. Why I Don't I Just Let You Read the Poem Now? Yeah, That's a Good Idea, I Think I'll Just Do That. Okay, Goodbye. It was then that I realized that this was a distinct and interesting form of poetry, so I'd better name it after myself before Steve did, because he'd written more of them than me and better ones, so at least this would let me ride his coattails to fame. And thus the Aaronagram was born, a poem consisting a senryu (or haiku) with a really long, stream of consciousness title.
I strongly encourage others to write Aaronagrams, because it's easy and fun, and mainly because it's named after me, so the more of them that are written, the more I, Aaron Wells, am glorified. What are the merits of this form? Well, for one thing, it puts more emphasis on the poem, rather than the title. With conventional poetry, one tends to remember a poem by its title, not the entire poem. But with Aaronagrams, it's just easier to remember the poem, not the title. So, in a Daoist sense, it's the ideal form of poetry because it makes one focus on the reality of the poem, not the label of its title. The other great thing about Aaronagrams is that they make tables of content really fucked up. Only one has ever been published, the afore-mentioned A Poem Based on the Idea that the Title is a Lot Longer than the Actual Poem, Which May Seem Like a Pretty Weak Concept, But, Hey, I had Writer's Block at the Time. C'mon, Let's See You Do Better, You Hypocrite. Anyhow, This Haiku, Well, Actually, It's a Senryu, Was True When I Wrote It, But Of Course Now It's a Little Off, Well, Actually It's Off By About Six Months Off. Oh, Whoops, I'm Rambling. Why I Don't I Just Let You Read the Poem Now? Yeah, That's a Good Idea, I Think I'll Just Do That. Okay, Goodbye. And in the table of contents where this one was published, it was listed only as "A Poem Based..." Major bummer. That's not the whole title. The whole title is A Poem Based on the Idea that the Title is a Lot Longer than the Actual Poem, Which May Seem Like a