The poem is a part of my upcoming collection Rumsfeld’s Sandbox and follows the publication of other poems in the collection. Those poems include:

• “Battlefield Confession”
• “Cigar”
• “Life”
• “Love And War”
• “Old Goth”
• “20 Acres”
• “Nocturne: Battlefield Sonnet”
• “The Armor Dims”
• “Carcass”
• “Siege”
• and “I Like War”

You will soon be able to read Rumsfeld’s Sandbox online as a digital book with audio presentations and downloadable .PDF broadsides and chapbooks. The planned publication date is March 19. Savvy readers will know that this is the anniversary date of the Iraq invasion, particularly the air strike on the presidential palace in Iraq.

More information will be published soon regarding Rumsfeld’s Sandbox. Meanwhile, take a peak at “Gunfight In Manhattan“.

Zukofsky was a Modernist. So it shouldn’t surprise me that he did this. All the Modernist’s wrote this way to some extent. One of my favorites, T.S. Eliot, was very adept at it.

Nevertheless, Zukofsky springs a Ballade on us, which is a specific type of form. It isn’t merely rhymed and metered in a nominal sense. It follows a very specific format. There are variations. The one Zukofsky chooses is the Ballade Supreme, consisting of three stanzas of 10 lines each where the final line of each stanza repeats itself. Then there is a five or six line envoy at the end that also repeats the repeating line.

The Ballade Supreme is often a tributary form and here Zukofsky uses it to pay a tribute to J.S. Bach. So I’m reading and come across this:

A pretty May note,
Singing Bach as they dug,

Isenacum en musica, hear us
Digging - we are singing of gardens - March
Day of equal night, Bach's chorus primus
To chorus secundus to the groined arch -
To vanish as the cone fruit of the larch:
Voice a voice blown, returning as May, dew
On night grass: and he said I worked hard, hue
Of word on the melody, (each note worth
Thought the clatter of a water-mill drew):
Labor, light lights in air, on earth, in earth.

...

Coda, see to it the burden renew,
Sound out thick gardens dug up in purlieu
The shrapnel haunts; May is red blossom, berth
Of what times' mill; blood reads the wounds, the cue -
Luteclavicembalo - bullets pursue:
Labor light lights in earth, in air, on earth.

And Part 8 ends.

Zukofky’s “A” is the perfect example of what I was talking about here.

“A” is a poem that can be classified as an avant-garde free verse poem and Zukofsky maintains that mode through most of the poem, but this well placed ballade at the end of Part 8 perfectly illustrates the freedom that poets are allowed to take in crafting their poems.

I’m not suggesting we should move backward to the Modernist poetics, and certainly not to Objectivism, but we should be mindful of the influences of poets like Zukofsky and his Modernist counterparts. We can take what they’ve done and improve upon it. There are poets today who are doing this and I applaud them.

If you are familiar with Twitter, kudos to you. If not, allow me to introduce you to the 21st century version of mass communication.

Twitter is an opt-in service that allows you to set up an account and a profile and instant message multiple people who have agreed to receive your messages. The messages, however, have a 140-character limit. Because of this limit, Twitter has been dubbed “microblogging”. It’s a way of sharing information in short snippets. I like Twitter for a number of reasons, one of which is because it forces me to think concisely. Brevity is key to good writing and Twitter forces you to be brief.

What Is A Twitter Poem?
So what is a Twitter poem? In a word, a Twitter poem is a poem that you write for Twitter and publish on Twitter. I have seen Twitter haikus and other poets have used Twitter to write short poems. I’ve even seen people Twitter an entire book.

As I see it, there are two ways you can use Twitter to write a poem. You can write a single poem within one “tweet” – the word for a message on Twitter. Or you can use each message to write a line in a poem. In the latter’s case, your poem can be as long as you want it to be as long as each line is no more than 140 characters. That’s not quite as challenging as writing a 140-character poem.

Keep in mind, we are talking about 140 characters, not words.

My Twitter Poem Experiment
Starting April 1, I will tweet one poem a day for 30 days. Each poem will consist of 140 characters or less. Each poem will exist within one tweet. No more. I will tweet each poem three times and every day throughout April I will publish a new poem. I’d welcome you to follow me, if you have an interest in seeing how this little experiment goes.

All you have to do to follow me is open a Twitter account and look for me at http://twitter.com/Allen_Taylor. My username on Twitter is Allen_Taylor. When you find me just click the Follow button and that’s all there is to it.

If you want to write your own Twitter poems in response I’d like to read them.

How To Write A Twitter Poem
Here are the guidelines that I’ll be using for my Twitter poems. You can write a poem on Twitter any way you like. But I’m using this method as a means of efficiency and so that there is consistency throughout the month. Whenever you see a Twitter poem it will look like this:

• Every line will end with /
• Stanzas will end with a double / – just like this //
• Poems will appear as one line with the above symbols to represent line and stanza breaks
• At the end of each poem you’ll see #twitpoem

That’s about it. Pretty simple. The #twitpoem is called a hashtag. If you go to http://search.twitter.com and type in the hashtag you’ll find all of the poems on one page.

Remember, the Twitter Poem Experiment starts on April 1. I will write one poem per day for 30 days. Each day I will tweet the poem three times. To read, you’ll have to follow me on Twitter. I hope to see you there.

If you were around in the late 1970s then you’ll probably remember the progressive rock group Alan Parsons Project. “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” was an imaginative take on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and still sells considerably well. You’ll love the video of the same title featuring the title track.

Other poetry videos included in the Poe collection include:

• The Raven (of course)
• Ulalume
• Annabel Lee

These are all amateur productions, but I consider them done well enough to share. I particularly like the high school production of “Annabel Lee”. But I’d encourage you to check them all out for yourself. You can do that by visiting the World Class Poetry video library, courtesy of YouTube.

On another note, I’m testing some new social features at World Class Poetry, this blog’s sister site. The features are limited at present, but you can sign up and await further developments. If you have a Google or Yahoo! login, or an OpenID, then you can login without registering. Also, I’ve added comment fields on all the book reviews on the site. Feel free to drop by and leave your comments on the reviews or if you’ve read the books, offer your own feedback.

Note, you can’t comment on the book review introduction page. To leave a comment you’ll have to click one of the book review links and scroll to the bottom of the page to leave a comment on the individual book reviews. Thanks! See you there.

The bio that appears at the bottom of the poem:

Allen Taylor spent 2005 stationed in Iraq, dreaming of being back home with his wife. Upon returning to the States he promptly told Uncle Sam to go fuck himself and started his own business. He manages World Class Poetry and writes the World Class Poetry blog. He never shaves.

Other poems included in the collection have appeared in The New Verse News and a local newspaper, The Hanover Evening Sun.

And if you’d prefer the lighter side – try this one.

For a broadside of the poem “Cigar”, featured in The New Verse News in January 2008, get the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

Before I share the poem with you I’d like to tell you what a Twitter poem is or may be. But first, what is Twitter?

Twitter: The Who, What, When, Where, And Why

Twitter, by all accounts, is a social media application that allows multiple people to carry on an extended conversation and various cross-conversations simultaneously. It’s like the party version instant messenger. You can type a message of up to 140 characters (that is the limit, no exceptions) and anyone who is following you can read that message.

It’s really very simple. But there are some complexities that go beyond the mere communication aspect of Twitter. I won’t get into those. Suffice it to say that Twitter is a means of communicating with a mass of people at one time through ultra-short messages.

Before you can follow someone on Twitter, you have to have an account. You simply fill out the application, fill out your 140 character profile and start finding people to follow. But why?

There are likely as man reasons to follow someone as there are people on Twitter. It’s whatever you want to get out of it, but generally people follow people they have an interest in or that typically post messages that are of an interesting nature. I follow several poets and publishers, business people, other Internet marketers, and some famous people I admire. Some of them follow me back. I also have a following of close to 170 people, some of whom I follow back. At present, I have 163 followers and 139 people that I follow.

When you log in to Twitter you see a simple screen with a write box at the top. That’s where you type your messages. Below that, you can see the messages of the people that you follow in an aggregated rollup so that there is no common thread between them. Those followers may or may not be following each other, but it doesn’t matter. They all have one thing in common: You are following them. Here’s a screenshot of my write box and a few messages from the people I am following.

My Twitter Poem – The Method Of My Madness

The method of writing this poem was fairly simple. It wasn’t difficult and didn’t involve some elaborate scheme. There really wasn’t much “craft” involved in a traditional sense. I’m not even sure it’s any good. Just a little tinkering.

Each page of Twitter features 20 messages. So I went back two pages and copied the messages from the people I’m following – each 140 characters or less – and pasted them into Notepad. I started with one line per strophe and carried that out until I found a tweet that was naturally two lines long. I then made each strophe two lines in length even if that involved two tweets. I maintained that rhythm until two-line strophes only consisted of one tweet, then I added another tweet to make that strophe three lines. I did that until two tweets produced four lines and continued this pattern until the end of the poem and it played out. I made no revisions to the tweets themselves.

I had considered, initially, of taking out the @ replies and just using the tweets themselves (I did, by the way, delete all URLs included in tweets, with one exception). The @ replies are replies that I or another Twitterer made in response to someone else’s tweet. Chances are, you have no idea what the original tweet was because all you see if the @ reply. That means the person who made the original post has no relation to me whatsoever, but the person who replied is someone that I am following.

You will notice a connection to some of these lines. That’s because the same Twitterer is the author of those lines. But none of the tweets by the same Twitterer are back-to-back.

Does a Twitter poem necessarily have to be done this way? No, not really. It could be done any number of ways. This is simply the way I approached this one and decided to leave it at that. It’s only an experiment. I’m sure there will be readers whose response is “WTF”? Others will likely consider it genius. I’m OK with either response. I’m just doodling. Nothing serious. And I don’t mean that to be any pejorative slap at Flarfists. It’s just the way it is.

Social Media Poetry – A New Form?

Flarf has managed to gain some notoriety since its inception. I’m not sure why. The few Flarf poems that I’ve read are a bit senseless, much like what you’ll read below. But the way you should read this poem is not as one line of thought as you would much of contemporary poetry, or classic poetry for that matter. Rather, it should be read as multiple one-sided conversations going on at once, for that is precisely what it is. Imagine yourself at a party and hearing multiple conversations taking place throughout a crowded room, but you can only capture snippets of each conversation. That’s essentially what this is.

Could this be the advent of a new type of poetry? I don’t know. I’m sure someone will have an answer for that. But I do see where innovative poets could take this idea and run with it. Not just with Twitter, but with any social media tool. The idea of a social communication poem strikes me as more valuable than Google sculpting, a practice taken up by the Flarfists. One could classify this type of poem in the Flarf category. Google sculpting relies on one’s ability to search for key phrases and use snippets of conversation or content from websites, forums, blog posts, and other website content to create a poem. But the social communication poem has a different approach and focuses instead on a different aspect of human interaction. It involves taking snippets of written communication from the above-mentioned content publications and using those to craft a poem. How many ways can this be done? I think the possibilities are limitless.

But without further ado, I give you this, my first Twitter poem. Love it, hate it, throw verbal insults at me if you will. I don’t think it’s much, but it was interesting just to experiment.

Man pays electric bill with spider

wow pownce was aquired by six apart

Learned that in middle/HS culture getting your house TP’d is says “you are admired!”. Wouldn’t a Hallmark card been cheaper and less work?

i wonder why sixapart would aquire pownce and then close it down
How to tell the difference between a recession and a depression;

holy carp this is a good heroes. gripped for the whole thing. if you stopped watching the show (I’d understand why), start watching again.

Bet you they’re going to fold Pownce into Vox.
I think they plan to role the technology into their own micro-blogging platform

Looking for a picture on my computer. I have about 20000 ugh I am looking through
WOW!! I received ‘The Arte y Pico Award’, which is for writers, to inspire others with creativity by @debgallardo

So my Twuffer ‘future tweets’ actually went live 30 minutes early…..
@Kimberly_Bock Thanks for the warning. Didn’t realize that would jack with the stumbles. TY for the Stumble.
Accidentally put on the christopher cross SAILING – still an awesome song – so much testosterone! Hard core.

Ha and it uses the triangle. Even less popular than COWBELL
common consensus from y’all is that Six Apart bought pownce and killed it for talent/developers and the IP/technology.
plus…. Pownce was probably going cheap…. was anyone still using it?
Jonathan Coulton performs Code Monkey Unplugged

Creepy Doll – Jonathan Coulton
Someone opened Bartleby, The Scrivener by Herman Melville
Dont miss it! You can get the notification w/password (free) by registering at http://www.selfstartersweek…
@remarkablogger Wish I knew how to do that. I hate Vista SO much.

funny how much talk there is about Pownce on Twitter. There’s a little on Pownce but more here – guess that says something
4 Cool Resources You Need to Check Out –
The skies are not happy
@Allen_Taylor you’re welcome. going to comment after i write this post…

Shall we play a game?
Gotta run out and do an errand. Keep it up everyone.
I am better now listening to some yelling and atonality
just tried to log into pownce and got an error –
@problogger I’m with the consensus
you are not expendable.

this takes a lot for me to tweet, but with the holidays nearing, I wish I was more spiritual. I’ve got good morals, values, etc. but…
@Kimberly_Bock Thanks!
The State of the Micromediasphere. Wanna join in and be a guest on the show DM me!
Please keep praying for Zoe http://www.zoesheart.com/ @Nikki_s just told they found her a heart.

@amyderby I got this week off!
Flogging Molly – Death Valley Queen
Flogging Molly – Another Bag of Bricks
@Kimberly_Bock Nice heart.

Well, that’s it. Any suggestions for a title?

I opened up my inbox to filter out all the spam – because I have to do that on occasion – and while there I decided to read some of my very important e-mail. That’s when I discovered a reply to a submission I sent in 14 days ago. The submission was sent to decomP, an online literary magazine.

I discovered decomP through Duotrope’s Digest, which I absolutely love. After reading through some of the other poems in the journal and the poetry of decomPs poetry editor, Misti Rainwater-Lites, on her blog, I decided decomP might be a good fit for a few of my poems. So I put together a standard 3-poem submission. I almost always send 3-5 poems (unless a publication asks for more, or less) in my submissions because it gives an editor an idea of your style overall and provides more choices than just one poem.

The title of the poem to be published by decomP is “The Armor Dims” and it will appear in the December 2008 issue. I think the journal may have liked my poem “Old Goth” as well, but since it had been published previously I doubt they would have republished it since their guidelines say they do not publish reprints. But that’s OK. I’m proud to be published among the fine poets getting their work into decomP and I look forward to seeing it in December. As is customary, I won’t publish “The Armor Dims” until it has appeared in decomP. If you want to read it, you’ll have to read it there.

Rumsfeld’s Sandbox Update

A couple of weeks ago I asked for suggestions on dealing with an impasse with regard to my current work, Rumsfeld’s Sandbox. Many of you offered suggestions and you’ll be glad to know I listened. I decided to take out some of the poems that I was planning to include. It’ll make the book lighter. I do still need to make a few tweaks and I’ve got a couple of poems that have been written but that have not been added to the manuscript. I still feel as though it is missing something. I’m not quite sure what. There is something I’m not saying and I don’t know what it is. It needs more festering, I suppose.

It’s been about three weeks now since my grandchildren have come to live with me. After my step-daughter and her Neanderthal boyfriend decided to uproot them and move them to Texas on a whim only to find themselves without a place to stay, no jobs, and no money within a week, it’s been a roller coaster ride getting these children back to a safe and secure place where they know people care about them. This is the second time in three years and I’m beginning to remember why I chose in my twenties not to pursue a family for myself. It leaves little time for writing, which has always been my highest priority.

Nevertheless, there is a full plate of things to do. I recently added my poem “Cigar” to World Class Poetry and added it to the World Class Poetry Toolbar as a free broadside. I have made many other updates to the site this week as well and you can read about them in the latest issue of Hyperbole. Plus, the list of things to do is huge and growing.

• I’ve got new pages to add to the site
• Some new features need to be added
• Some current features need updating
• I have a list of books to review
• Plus, I’ve got a few of my own pet projects to get under way
• And I have poems to revise and new poems to write

I don’t know how I’m going to get to it all. The oldest grandchild is in first grade and has nightly homework. We have two children at home, one of which is an overactive five year old. And we’re entering the busy season for our business. Plus, the six year old has Cub Scout meetings on Thursdays and we’ve got a project to work on and finish by this Thursday. I’m dying over here.

Ah, the joys!

To folks who are waiting on me to review your book, please be patient. I’m working on them. It’s a slow go, but I follow through on all of my commitments. Please don’t e-mail me and ask about the status of your book. I will review them and spend ample enough time with each one as I do so. Currently on my list are the following titles:

• History’s Twists: The Armenians by Helene Pilibosian (reading this one now)
• The World of Richard Dadd by Michael Mott (for Rattle)
• What Feeds Us by Diane Lockward
• Sonata for Rain by Rebecca Gonzalez
• Fumbling In The Light by Sidney Hall Jr.
• Blue Mist White Rain by Sha Raaven
• 100 Sonnets by Day Williams
• see what i see by Susie McCray
• A Man In Transition by K.L.
• Confessions of a Latter Day Cynic by Paul J. Bean
• The Poets Don’t Write Sonnets Anymore by Robin Ridington

In addition to these, I’ve got my own list of books to read through including a second reading of Itinerary by the late Reginald Shepherd. I have been putting off ordering Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet for a week now, but I won’t be able to put it off much longer. And this is just the tip of the iceberg where the reading and the updating are concerned.

I missed the Dodge Poetry Festival this weekend even though I wanted to go. Other things, of course, took priority. It seems the more I try to immerse myself into the literary scene the more things pop up to prevent me from getting in as deep as I want to go. I must remind myself that the writing always take precedence over the networking and the marketing. I think too many poets get that backward.

John Lennon once quipped, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” That’s the way I have felt for much of my life. While I have busied myself planning a literary career, other things have taken over. Still, I am not discouraged. My head is too thick and I’m too hopeful to be bitter.