The Tweeting Poet
The Guardian, on a slow news day, recently reported a two-month-old lecture by the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Geoffrey Hill, in which he seemed to take issue with the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy (the press is only ever interested in poetry if they can present it as a "spat between poets"). For the record, you could easily take issue with both. Duffy had said that poetry and texting had a lot in common, being both forms of condensed utterance, which is the sort of daft thing people my age say when they are trying to sound as if they totally get Da Yoof, man. Hill pointed out, very fairly, that textspeak was not condensed but truncated, and that there's an important difference. He then went on to ruin his case by comparing Duffy's own lexis to Mills & Boon, which it isn't, and by going to the other extreme, ie pretending to be a High Court judge who'd never heard of Da Yoof.
Silliness all round, but I do think it raises an interesting question, namely whether the new media of tweeting and texting, with their very restricted word limits, are potentially useful media for poets.
I must say, though, that from the examples I've read so far, I am unconvinced that either tweeting or texting has much to offer the poet as a medium. Teachers are always urging poetry students to condense their utterance, on the theory that the fewer words you use, the more effective they'll be, and mostly they're right. But I do think it possible to over-condense, to end up with a kind of gnomic utterance that doesn't in fact give itself enough space to accommodate nuance and meaning, let alone flex the imagination. For me, and I know this is heresy to some, most haiku fall into this category. I know they are meant to send the mind roaming beyond the words on the page, and I've read a few that do, but most leave me thinking "so what?"
Tweeting poets also face another peril. Tweets, with their 140-character limit, lend themselves to the aphorism, which is why comedians and politicians make great tweeters. Epigrammatic satirist poets could use it to great advantage too; Pope and von Logau would have tweeted brilliantly.
But that isn't how most poets use it. Some tweet as people rather than as poets, the same way everyone else does, ie for publicity and amusement, which is fine. But some do produce "poetic" tweets, which generally look like an image or a choice line taken out of the context of a poem and displayed in a glass case. And these really don't work for me, any more than a peacock stuffed in a museum resembles the same bird strutting and yawping on a castle lawn. Context matters. Reading "the land of spices, something understood" in the context of a George Herbert poem is transcendent; reading it as a stand-alone tweet would probably make me go "oh puh-leeze" and wince with embarrassment. The greatest line, decontextualised and tweeted, can look perilously like something by Hallmark. People are forever posting mystical quotes from Gibran or similar trite gurus online; you develop an automatic yuk response and it's easily set off.
What such tweets seem to be aiming for, in fact, is to get the effect Hemingway once called the wow at the end of the story without the tedious business of writing what leads up to it. Now I can sympathise with this to a degree, because it's an effect often aimed for, and achieved, in fan fiction. There it can be done because both writer and reader are using a shared canon; if you write a Romeo & Juliet fanfic, you are writing for an audience that already knows the end, and hence a great deal can be conveyed without being said. Shared canon fic is in fact well suited to this form, you could do some great fanfic tweets. But the Poetic Tweet, hauling some image or thought out of the context that made it seem inevitable to where it just looks like an attempt at Fine Language, hardly ever works for me. Where poets have done something readable with it, it's almost always by using a sequence of tweets, which gives far more scope, as do sequences of linked haiku. But both kind of miss the point of the medium.
Silliness all round, but I do think it raises an interesting question, namely whether the new media of tweeting and texting, with their very restricted word limits, are potentially useful media for poets.
I must say, though, that from the examples I've read so far, I am unconvinced that either tweeting or texting has much to offer the poet as a medium. Teachers are always urging poetry students to condense their utterance, on the theory that the fewer words you use, the more effective they'll be, and mostly they're right. But I do think it possible to over-condense, to end up with a kind of gnomic utterance that doesn't in fact give itself enough space to accommodate nuance and meaning, let alone flex the imagination. For me, and I know this is heresy to some, most haiku fall into this category. I know they are meant to send the mind roaming beyond the words on the page, and I've read a few that do, but most leave me thinking "so what?"
Tweeting poets also face another peril. Tweets, with their 140-character limit, lend themselves to the aphorism, which is why comedians and politicians make great tweeters. Epigrammatic satirist poets could use it to great advantage too; Pope and von Logau would have tweeted brilliantly.
But that isn't how most poets use it. Some tweet as people rather than as poets, the same way everyone else does, ie for publicity and amusement, which is fine. But some do produce "poetic" tweets, which generally look like an image or a choice line taken out of the context of a poem and displayed in a glass case. And these really don't work for me, any more than a peacock stuffed in a museum resembles the same bird strutting and yawping on a castle lawn. Context matters. Reading "the land of spices, something understood" in the context of a George Herbert poem is transcendent; reading it as a stand-alone tweet would probably make me go "oh puh-leeze" and wince with embarrassment. The greatest line, decontextualised and tweeted, can look perilously like something by Hallmark. People are forever posting mystical quotes from Gibran or similar trite gurus online; you develop an automatic yuk response and it's easily set off.
What such tweets seem to be aiming for, in fact, is to get the effect Hemingway once called the wow at the end of the story without the tedious business of writing what leads up to it. Now I can sympathise with this to a degree, because it's an effect often aimed for, and achieved, in fan fiction. There it can be done because both writer and reader are using a shared canon; if you write a Romeo & Juliet fanfic, you are writing for an audience that already knows the end, and hence a great deal can be conveyed without being said. Shared canon fic is in fact well suited to this form, you could do some great fanfic tweets. But the Poetic Tweet, hauling some image or thought out of the context that made it seem inevitable to where it just looks like an attempt at Fine Language, hardly ever works for me. Where poets have done something readable with it, it's almost always by using a sequence of tweets, which gives far more scope, as do sequences of linked haiku. But both kind of miss the point of the medium.
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