There is a wonderful variety of short literary forms: limericks, quatrains, haiku, couplets, epigrams, anecdotes, jokes, riddles, parables, fables, proverbs, maxims, blackouts, slogans, and on and on. Some are simply passing thoughts; others pack as much meaning as possible into the smallest space.

Here, we’ll trot out the one-word poem — to be specific, the one-word poem as practiced by Abraham Lincoln Gillespie.

Gillespie (1895-1950) was active in Paris in the ’20s, an ebullient modernist who contributed to transition and other journals. He attributed his taste for Joycean puns and neologisms to a head injury, which may have cost him some critical respect. In the ’30s, he moved back to the US, and spent the rest of his short life shuttling between the Bohemian communities in Philadelphia and Manhattan, diabetic, alcoholic, and chronically unemployed.

He wrote essays and poems, but had a special penchant for one-word constructions. All of his surviving work was collected in The Syntactic Revolution, edited by Richard Milazzo, and published by Out of London Press in 1980. Copies are now scarce. My cherished copy was ruined in a flood; I’m grateful to Etienne Gilfillan for tracking down another. Thanks, Etienne!

Here, then, are the first eleven entries from “A PURPLEXICON OF DISSYNTHEGRATIONS (TDEVELOP ABUT EARFLUXSATISVIE-THRU-HEYPERSIEVING)”:

punziplaze
karmasokist
DecoYen
Pompieraeian
scaruscatracery
timmedigets
outrége
Opinducts
pretensnarrant
MustEVit
spirackrete

And, as a nightcap, a two-worder from “PIZZIKATS (SERIES 2)”:

loosiditties (Thdrink)

(Posted by Doug Skinner)