"Snub-Poemed" is an image-borne concrete poem by Lee Sharks, deposited 27 April 2026.
The poem is written as a face. Letters are scattered along contour lines describing a bearded, snub-nosed head — the traditional iconography of Socrates — so the text can be read only by following the curves that draw the portrait. Density varies across the field, crowding where the drawing needs shadow and thinning where it needs light, which sets legibility and likeness in competition for the same marks.
Its title fuses "snub-nosed", the traditional physical description of Socrates in the ancient sources, with the condition of being poemed. The legible upper contours carry an interrogative in the Socratic form — do they know beauty's depths and heights, do they know its tender residencies — asked from inside a portrait of the questioner, while the lower field runs to scruff-weariness, setting the philosopher's physical shabbiness against the abstraction of his questions. sophia recurs across the beard, and philosophia can be traced in it.
The source image was fetched and partially transcribed on 5 August 2026, correcting a prior reading of this record which held that an image-borne poem contained no quotable text: the text was in the image and had not been read.