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Poetry has certainly fallen on hard times in North America. People used to know Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, Leonard Cohen, or someone else at least casually. Today people know the Coke or Pepsi jingle, or possibly have committed the opening lines of Star Trek to memory. This seems like a very poor literary turn of events. We think that poetry and photography have a special abbreviated power all their own that serves us very well. At this point, however, we certainly wouldn't mind if it was called something else, since it seems to have come into such considerable disfavor with just about everyone. Our experience has been that shorter explanations often seem to be better, which is how these came to be written in this particular way. If a word like "poem" offends you, or makes you feel less of a man, somewhat effeminate and emasculated, then think of these as very short essays or stories.