---
title: ""Snub-Poemed""
axn: "AXN:0246.GENERATIVE.🕔🌍🕕🐚🎬🌔"
creator: "Lee Sharks"
date: "2026-04-27"
hash: "660e677af1031171474921221bef0994597f91d11613210bbce5774dd30f143f"
status: "MINTED_UNREVIEWED"
---


# "Snub-Poemed"

*Image-borne concrete poem · Lee Sharks · 2026-04-27*

![Snub-Poemed — a face of Socrates composed from scattered letters](/data/attachments/AXN-0246/snub-poemed.png)

**The image is the work.** It is held in the archive at [`/data/attachments/AXN-0246/snub-poemed.png`](/data/attachments/AXN-0246/snub-poemed.png) — a durable local copy, not a hotlink — and is downloadable from the record page.

**Source image:** PNG, 800 × 1035, 191,761 bytes, SHA-256 `bc709b05ff5e18d514a161dad34320402e0b84a508261a3b33ce8674dcc15967`. Fetched from the authorial blog surface 2026-08-05 (HTTP 200).

---

## The work

The poem is written *as* a face. Letters are scattered along contour lines that describe a bearded, snub-nosed head — the traditional iconography of Socrates — so that the text is legible only by following the curves that draw the portrait. Density varies across the field: the letters crowd where the drawing needs shadow and thin where it needs light, which means legibility and likeness compete for the same marks.

The title fuses **"snub-nosed"**, the traditional physical description of Socrates in the ancient sources, with the condition of being *poemed* — made into, or subjected to, a poem.

## Transcription (partial)

The following phrases are legible with confidence along the upper contours. **This is a partial transcription and is marked as such**: the field is dense, several arcs interleave, and letters shared between adjacent contours can be read into more than one phrase. What is set down here is what can be traced; the rest of the field is not transcribed rather than guessed.

> …they know beauty's **depths and heights**? do…
>
> doth they know its **tender residencies** in the…
>
> …doth they have…
>
> …the philosopher's…
>
> …I… **prolonging my scruff**…
>
> …my **scruff-weary**…

The word **sophia** recurs across the lower field, and **philosophia** can be traced in the beard.

## Note on the reading

The interrogative construction — *do they know beauty's depths and heights, do they know its tender residencies* — places the poem in the Socratic question form, addressed from inside a portrait of the questioner. The scruff-weariness of the closing arcs sets the philosopher's physical shabbiness against the abstraction of the questions, which is the joke the ancient sources make about Socrates and the one the poem inherits.

*Transcribed 2026-08-05 from the source image. The image is the work; the transcription is apparatus.*