CHAMPIER, France (AFP) — A 30-year-old Frenchman displayed on Friday what he claimed is the longest poem in world — nearly 7,600 verses written on a roll of fabric that stretched more than a half-mile on a racetrack in southeast France. Patrick Huet, a public notary, spent a month and a half composing Pieces of Hope to the Echo of the World and then a further month copying it onto the material, which was unrolled with the help of a tractor.
The work is an acrostic, a poem in which the first letters of each verse spell out a message — in this case the text of the 30 articles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.