Unfogged Cheers Us Up

For all y'all English & Humanities people, an amazing post is happening over at Unfogged.

To wit: Reducing great poems to their essence.

How does one do that, you might ask. It's a good question! We read that "Queneau demonstrated that Mallarmé's sonnets that one could remove all but the rhyming bit at the end of each line and obtain a "haikuized" version that was not only faithful to the original but … more elegant", but there is a verse form even more suited to displaying a single poetic thought than the haiku (or, for that matter, the list of end rhymes), and it is, in fact, a distinctively American form: the Burma-Shave ad.

They fuck you up
Your mum and pop
Reproducing?
Please just stop
Burma-Shave

Bananas are for
Shrews in pinks
Nuncle, plainly
Your taste stinks
Burma-Shave

From Jesus:

The hired man
Needs work, he said
Slept by the stove
And now he's dead
Burma-Shave

Some really wonderful examples in the comments.  My favorite so far:

How he rung upon the rein
Of a wimpling wing
Alliterátion
Is a tricky thing
Burma-Sháve