Throughout my last two posts, I’ve been thinking about strength (and complication) in numbers—the first person plural: “We.” In between those posts and this one, the news broke that boxer and activist Muhammad Ali passed away on June 3 at the age of seventy-four. It is apt to think of Ali in the context on the word “We,” as that two-letter word was one of only two two-letter words included in what many take to be the world’s shortest poem, recited by Ali in a commencement speech delivered at Harvard on June 4, 1975—forty-one years, almost to the day, before his death. At the end of his speech, there was a call from the audience to deliver a poem, and in the expectant silence, the poem Ali delivered was the following:
Me
We
Journalist George Plimpton recounts this anecdote in in the documentary When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s film that follows the story of the famous 1974 heavyweight championship match between Ali and George Foreman in what was then Zaire, and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
While I can’t find a clip of Ali reciting the poem itself during that particular speech, I did find clips of other parts of the Harvard speech, here highlighting his sense of humor, and here, getting more serious, focusing on a sense of self and others.
As Ali delivered his poetry orally, the text remains open to the more light-hearted homophonic reading of “Me— / Whee!,” an alternative take that Ali himself certainly highlighted when he first delivered the poem on a 1963 talk show. A woman in the audience asks, “Do you write your own poetry, and do you think in rhyme?” And Ali replies, “Yes I do. I write my own poetry, and I think in rhyme, and as a matter of fact, while I’m talking to you, I’m writing the greatest short poem of all time. This poem tells how it feels to be as great as me. This is it – the greatest short poem of all time: Me? Whee!”
Did Ali’s sense of his two-syllable poem change between 1963 and 1975? Or were the two possibilities, one a tongue-in-cheek boast, the other, almost an aphorism or koan, always coexistent for Ali?
I find resonance in the shortest poem in our language as the ultimate distillation of individual self and communal self—a rhymed couplet of the first persona singular and the first person plural, even if a joke plays at its margins.
“Me / We” is certainly not Ali’s only famous poem. We all know “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” though Jonathan Eig, an Ali biographer, actually attributes that phrase to one of Ali’s cornermen. Whether or not all of Ali’s famous lines and rhymes were his and his alone seems less important than the capaciousness of his memory’s poetic arsenal and the one-two punch of his verbal delivery.
On June 6, NPR’s Juan Vidal focused on Ali as “a poet in and out of the ring,” saying:
He was a truth teller in every sense, an anti-war pot-stirrer with a wry wit who would effortlessly kick into verse mid-conversation. He wasn’t a politician like some have tried to make him out to be. But his presence, his voice, and his poet-like conviction carried political weight beyond that of any athlete of his era, and perhaps ever.
Ali had a love of language, and a skill for linguistic theatrics that, while plainspoken, packed heft. He was Whitman donning white trunks and a robe. Not bad for a man who may have suffered from dyslexia, who barely graduated from high school.
Vidal continues:
Ali was a physical poet, and when he said he ‘done handcuffed lightning’ his adversaries had no choice but to believe. He flipped similes and metaphors like a battle rapper holding court in a cipher that was his and his alone. Even his jabs were like couplets that told you more about yourself than you could have ever hoped to know. But there always seemed to be deeper meaning behind his expression, and his terse, lyrical trash-talk represented something bigger than even he could have predicted.
In addition to Vidal’s, this week after Ali’s death has brought a number of other lovely tributes focusing on Ali as a wordsmith, including Chas Danner’s New York Magazine piece “Muhammad Ali’s Life in Poetry, Activism, and Trash Talk,” Katy Waldman’s Slate piece “‘I Done Handcuffed Lightning’: The Exuberant Spoken-Word Poetry of Muhammad Ali,” and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Muhammad Ali, The Political Poet” in The New York Times. Read them for more on his friendship with the poet Marianne Moore, the political ramifications of his versifying, and comments on Ali’s words from the literary likes of Maya Angelou. And don’t miss Elizabeth Alexander reading her persona poem “Narrative: Ali” on Democracy Now.
I’ll end with two rhyming tercets that are, of course, “after” the two facets, the light-hearted and the sincere, of Muhammad Ali’s great shortest poem (shortest great poem?), simply adding one last rhyme in retrospect.
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Me?
Whee!
–Ali
*
Me
We
RIP
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