“Shrink Lit” and Haikus – Poetry for People with Short Attention Spans

661 words

Remedy for an aversion to long form literature?

Are you someone with a hankering for an inkling of what the classic works of literature are about but don't fancy the Herculean task of trying to wade through 783 pages of Ulysses or the 24 books of the Iliad? Then maybe taking a journey into the realm of the Haiku, the traditional Japanese abridged form of poetry, is for you. The Japanese have been knocking out these miniature poems comprising three unrhymed lines with a 5, 7, 5 syllable structure for centuries. The Haiku’s emphasis on simplicity of style and evocation of nature and the four seasons is well-illustrated by Japanese  master Matsuo Bashō’s “The Old Pond”:

An ancient pool,
A frog jumps in
The sound of water.

Seventeen syllables to meditate by, but the Haiku concept is not confined to the East, westerners have cottoned on to the possibilities of the Haiku form, hence it's adaptation to the Western canon of literature. The Haiku has attracted many of the cream of modern American literati, illustrious names like Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright and ee cummings have had a stab at it. Come the 1970s and the Haiku gave inspiration to a little-known Massachusetts editor called Maurice Sagoff who coined the term “shrink lit” to describe his idiosyncratic, unique collection of terse light verse (Shrinklits: Seventy of the World”s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size). Sagoff downsizes many of literature’s great tomes, reducing them to humorous, light in tone, condensed poetic summaries, a textual reductio ad absurdum. The eclectic collection ranges from Antigone to Beowulf to The Hobbit  to Portnoy’s Complaint to The Communist Manifesto. Sagoff’s ‘Shrinklits’ don’t  adhere to the 5–7–5 formula so they really don’t fit in the category of the Haiku, though in their brevity and spirit they certainly draw inspiration from the Japanese short form. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven is rendered thus:

Raven lurches  
In, perches 
Over door. 
Poet’s bleary 
Query— 
“Where’s Lenore?” 
Creepy bird 
Knows one word: 
“Nevermore”.

The Victorian classic Alice in Wonderland, after Sagoff’s scalpel got through with it, made the “adventurous” Alice seem like she was experiencing a Sixties psychedelic trip:

Holed up
With bunny,
Pre-teen
Acts funny. 
Aberrations – 
Hallucinations – 
Wild scenes – 
Tarts, Queens, 
Clearly, she 
Needs therapy.

Following upon the Sagoff prototype came New York attorney-turned-writer David Bader who took up the cause of shrink lit creativity with even more minimalist effect. The result: One Hundred Great Books in Haiku, which executed a highly-inventive and rollickingly funny hatchet job summation of many of English literature’s revered classic masterpieces. Below is is a short sample of Bader’s razor-sharp three-line distillations:

Pride and Prejudice 
Single white lass seeks 
landed gent for marriage, whist.
No parsons, thank you.

Walden (Henry David Thoreau) 
Morning: Pond-gazing.
Afternoon: Berry-picking.
What a hectic day.

Moby Dick
Vengeance! Black blood! Aye!
Doubloons to him that harpoons 
the Greenpeace dinghy.

Odyssey
Aegean forecast –
Storms, chance of one-eyed giants, 
Delays expected.

The Inferno (Dante)
Abandon all hope! 
Looks like everyone’s down here.  
Omigod – the Pope.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover
On the grounds, fresh game, 
On the new gamekeeper,  fresh 
Lady Chatterley.

Lolita
Lecherous linguist –
He lays low and is laid low 
after laying Lo.

Bader also published Haikus for Jews, For You, A Little Wisdom, laden with oodles of mocking, Woody Allen-style Jewish self-deprecation:

Jewish triathlon – – 
gin rummy, then contract bridge, 
followed by a nap.

Not to be outdone by America, the Antipodes came up with it’s own selection of shrunken literary works…Michele Field’s Oz Shrink Lit turned the form towards home-grown Australian works of literature. Anyone familiar with Peter Carey’s darkly comic fable Bliss, an indictment of contemporary consumer society, or with the film of the novel, would recognise Field’s rhyming shrink lit take on the work: 

Always selling, always nice, 
Ad man Harry snuffs it twice,
Wakes to find he lives in Hell, 
Now his wife does adverts well.

13 May 2026