I don’t think the New Formalist poets have that problem. From X.J. Kennedy to Dana Gioia, the New Formalist’s have their own problems. But I’m not going to tell you about them here. Instead, I’ll let you read about them at the World Class Poetry New Formalism page.

And if you think you’d like to write a page like that, contact me and let me know.

But this post isn’t about the military. I just wanted to announce a new page on the World Class Poetry website. But for the first time, it’s not a page that I had a hand in producing.

Two years ago I had students from a local high school write pages for the site for which they received extra credit from their teacher, the poet Dana Larkin Sauers. Many of those pages required heavy editing, though the information was stellar and I appreciate the effort those students put into the writing. It allowed me to add many new pages to the site in a much shorter time frame that I could have done alone.

Recently, however, I’ve had the assistance of another writer who has produced a page for World Class Poetry and I’m very excited to present that page to you now. Jack Peachum has written a good overview of The Imagists and that page is now live.

I’d like you to welcome Jack to World Class Poetry. You can consider him a staff writer. I have decided that I’ll never be able to reach my publishing goals without assistance from other lovers of poetry who can write informational content for all levels of skill and experience. If you think that you might like to join World Class Poetry and write informational content like the one Jack produced then get more information on how you can join us and contact me regarding opportunities.

I’m looking forward to more great work from Jack Peachum and I hope you are too.

After completely reading through all 508 pages, I went back and re-read the introductions to see if I had missed something. Swensen, in her introduduction to the work, gives a clear and concise definition of what she calls hybrid poetry with these words:

Hybrid poems often honor the avant-garde mandate to renew the forms and expand the boundaries of poetry – thereby increasing the expressive potential of language itself – while also remaining committed to the emotional spectra of lived experience. (emphasis mine)

This is what I believe ties most of the poems in American Hybrid together, though that’s not what I would consider a hybrid poem.

What Is A Hybrid Poem, Exactly?
To be sure, whoever defines the terms controls the conversation. The way that Swensen and St. John have defined hybrid, it could almost apply to any poet who has ever written a poem in any century except that the term and concept of avant-garde didn’t exist prior to the 19th century. Here’s what St. John says in his introduction:

Although I have always distrusted writers who run in packs, I welcome all literary partisanship as a gesture toward what I would call a “values clarification” in poetry. However, let’s be frank. We are at a time in our poetry when the notion of the “poetic school” is an anachronism, an archaic critical artifact of times long gone by.

In other words, since poetic schools are no longer necessary and you are a poet writing today you can borrow elements from two or more schools and that makes you a hybrid. I don’t think so. I believe the concept of hybridization in poetry deserves a more critical look than that.

While Swensen starts out discussing the historic divide between the avant-garde and everyone else, she quickly moves on to other waters in an attempt to get to the heart of the American hybrid. In the end, it all boils down to whether or not a poet is true to one school or flirts with another.

Personally, I think the delineations between avant-garde and traditional poetry are still necessary and helpful. The emergence of both the Language poets and New Formalists at right about the same time is evidence of this. While I would not adhere to, or encourage others to adhere to, either extreme entirely, I do think that poetic purity is a positive in a volatile world.

Is The Avant-Garde Truly The Vanguard?
The avant-garde philosophy has been around in some form through most of written history. However, it is recognized that the art movement began in the early 19th century with a French utopian socialist by the name of Henri de Saint-Simon.

It is important to note that Saint-Simon was a Christian Humanist who had a vision to reorganize society into a group of elites made up of philosophers, scientists, engineers and other intellectuals. His philosophy was instrumental in the development of many ideologies that are now considered mainstream and a part of the hierarchical structure of society that he tried to tear down. Among them are sociology and economics. His disciples include Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology as a science, renown utilitarian economist John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, who needs no introduction.

In essence, avant-gardeism started out as a political movement, but it was the artists, most notably in France and Italy, who picked up on it and started communicating the ideas of the movement through their works. The poetic forerunners of the avant-garde include Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire, ensuring that French surrealism would take a high position within the movement.

Avant-garde artists of all media have historically considered themselves to be the progenitors of greatness while their traditional counterparts were mired in unthinking mediocrity. While some of that may be true, it is largely a posturing move to make avant-gardeists feel better about themselves for being shunned by the power structure that mocks them. Art and poetry have long been a violent political battlefield.

But politics aside, the real matter is whether avant-garde poetry is any good or not and whether it is, as their most vocal apologist’s maintain, the vanguard of letters. While I maintain that poets writing today can learn from any poet or movement of poetry and incorporate synergistic elements into their own work, I also am baffled at some of the techniques that poets use in their attempts to communicate. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. And just because it is done doesn’t make it great. Furthermore, just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t suddenly make it a genius moment for those who do it. Replace any innovation with the word “it” as you will.

Those are postulates, not absolutes. By the same token, just because the mainstream doesn’t like it or appreciate it doesn’t mean it isn’t great, shouldn’t be done, or not profitably worthwhile when it is done. Everything must be judged on its own merit.

Introduction To The Post-Avant Malaise
I write in many forms and styles. I try not to restrict myself, though I recognize that certain techniques are more useful than others. Some are just plain ridiculous.

We all have our preferences and many of us have our prejudices. With regard to the latter, I try to keep an open mind and attempt to understand what a poet is trying to do. But that is sometimes hard.

In order to get to the bottom of what precisely is considered “post avant”, it is necessary to understand what is avant-garde, the genesis of the post. At the heart of it, the avant-garde consists of the following attributes:

• Experimental
• Rejection of traditional values
• Esoteric
• Bohemian
• Anti-structural

To what degree then is post-avant poetics opposed to these values? The answer is: None. The post-avant poet is firmly rooted in all of these avant-garde values, rejecting none.

However, the post-avant is just as likely to use traditional elements as avant-garde elements in their poetry. See the contradiction?

Good. Because it’s a planned and conscious contradiction.

The difference between the avant-garde and the post-avant is that the latter has no political overtones. It seeks to borrow literary elements from wherever it may find them and incorporate them into a singular poem without regard for the social or political implications. That obviously leaves some schools out of the running for post-avant status.

The Problem With The Avant-Garde
I will say right at the outset that I am not a formalist, either new or old. While I have a deep and abiding respect for all the forms and reserve the right to use them, or modify them, they are not the defining attribute of poetics. By the same token, they shouldn’t be rejected outright because they are traditional. I see both extremes as irrational prejudice.

Another idea I reject is the notion that poetry is inherently an aural art. It isn’t. The reason primitive cultures chose to communicate their poetry through oral presentation is because they couldn’t communicate in writing. When they did undertake written communication it was done in the way of visual images first. Later, language was developed. As societies and cultures grew and developed new technologies, poetry evolved into visual and concrete forms and structures. It was a natural development.

Poetry is communication. Plain and simple. That means that poets can use any medium at their disposal. It also means that there are a rich diversity of structures, forms, and techniques available, both oral and written. Nevertheless, any virtue can be taken to extreme.

The avant-garde is possible because of the visual nature of modern poetry. Aural poetry could never develop an avant-garde movement because there’d be no way for it to communicate apart from sound. So it’s no coincidence that the avant-garde didn’t come along until the 19th century. But there is one thing that bothers me about the style of avant-gardeists and that one thing is evident in many of the poems to be found in American Hybrid.

The problem with the avant-garde is its emphasis on the disjunctive over the logical in language. I’ll use a poem from American Hybrid to illustrate my meaning:

Lucent road, first letter.                      Evening spooked with light.
Quarter moon road                     with the darkness inside it, and full
moon
sky with the tree inside it.                    Curved road in the gloaming.
Oak trunk, a vector of force          punched upward. held in place

The above lines are taken from a poem titled “Road And Tree” by Forrest Gander, who the editors describe as “Lyrically rooted and visually adventuresome”. That’s not quite how I’d put it.

To start with, we’re not given an instruction manual on how to read this poem. Do we read down first or across first? We’re left to figure it out. I found that it reads better when read across first. But if it reads so well that way then why do we need the fissure down the middle of the poem? You’d think that maybe the subject matter is a clue, but it’s not. This is a device that Gander uses throughout several poems, always with the same disjunctive feel. There seems to be a constant flow of thought across the spaces, but not necessarily.

For instance, in the second line, is the quarter moon road dark inside and full or are we supposed to see these two clauses as independent as evidenced by the crack between them? We’re not told. And there aren’t any clues. Nor, does the poet (or the editors, for that matter) feel the need to clue us in. We’re just supposed to accept it the way it is.

This is the kind of disjunctive language that epitomizes much of the avant-garde, particularly schools like the Language school. It’s one of the most irritating things I’ve seen in late-school poetics.

On the other hand, there are poets, like Brenda Hillman and Martin Corless-Smith, who use this double-line form to great effect and I understand those poems. While it isn’t a technique I’m particularly married to, it is something I can live with if the lines appear controlled by the poet and not vice-versa.

In summary, the problem with a pure avant-garde philosophy is that if you are anti-traditional and experimental for the sake of the same then it’s a lot like spending $200 on a paid escort for the night and masturbating while she waits outside your dorm room fully clothed.

Is It Hybrid, Post-Avant Or Millennial?
Call it what you want, but poetry written today is nothing like poetry that was written 100 years ago, or even 30 years ago. And that’s the point behind Swensen’s and St. John’s American Hybrid. To them, a hybrid poem can consist of a poem borrowing elements from the Language School and Surrealism, both avant-garde traditions. To me, that’s not really a hybrid poem. But a definition is only as good as the theoretical foundation upon which it stands.

Some of the poets in American Hybrid are purely married to the avant-garde. Who can deny that John Ashbery hasn’t been one of the most experimental poets of the 20th century? I like his work, but I’d be hard pressed to find anything traditional in it. So should he be considered a hybrid poet simply because he achieved a certain level of mainstream notoriety?

What about Rae Armantrout, a founding member of the Language School who has gone on to better things, albeit mostly in the avant-garde tradition? Or Barbara Guest, who is the “quintessential hybrid poet” according to Swensen? She started out identifying with the New York School and later moved into the Language camp. But the former is a forerunner to the latter so how is that “hybrid”, exactly?

I hope you can see my dilemma. To me, it isn’t hybrid if you borrow elements from two or more avant-garde schools. Nor would I particularly consider that post-avant, to use Ron Silliman’s phrase.

When I think of post-avant, I think of poets like Reginald Shepherd, Paul Hoover, or Brenda Hillman, all of whom are represented in American Hybrid. Their work truly exemplifies elements from the avant-garde tradition as well as the formal traditions.

I appreciate the work that Swensen and St. John put into American Hybrid. There are truly some fabulous poems, and great poets, included. But I think they have broadened the definition of hybrid too far. I agree with St. John when he says “Our poetry should be as various as the natural world, as rich and peculiar in its potential articulations”. I was glad to see Swensen discussing poets using the Internet to market and publish their poems and reach new audiences (a hot button for me). But my definition of hybrid differs from theirs.

To revisit some posts that I wrote last year, I offer the following principles as a 10-pillar base for a new school of poetics, what I call The Millennial School. But it makes no difference if you call it The Millennial School, Post Avant, or hybrid poetry, it all points back to the idea that 21st century poetics is on the move, not tied down by traditions or tainted with political baggage. Poets today care about one thing: Writing great lines fused with great images that communicate great things.

Millennial Poetics Revisited

• Craft is of utmost importance
• There is no room for prejudice
• Form is just another element of craft
• Creativity and craft go hand in hand
• No topic is taboo
• Language is the fundamental tool of the craft
• All poems are individuals
• There is no acceptable method to writing poetry
• All convention should be shunned
• Technology may be used to enhance the poetry experience.

I’ll leave the elaboration for another post, or you can revisit my series on this topic from last year.

Meanwhile, pick up your copy of American Hybrid and make your own judgments.

• Contemporary antiquities
• Elevated valley
• Stupid genius
• Utopian nihilist

That last one is a real-world example. I can’t think of any that I’d have thought of at 21, but “utopian nihilist” is the type of phrase that I’d have enjoyed coming up with. I didn’t conjure this one, however. Milo Martin did.

Milo Martin is a West Coast slam poet who has traveled extensively in Europe as a touring poet. He is also the founder of the Utopian Nihilist poetry movement. Their principles are intriguing and exist as a list of 26 proclamations, to be found in the back of Martin’s debut book of poems, Poems For The Utopian Nihilist.

Here are a few hand selected verses from the Utopian Nihilist Manifesto:

• We are born Utopians; it is through the scarring of socialization that some of us become Nihilists.
• The Utopian sees the wine glass as half-full whereas the Nihilist sees it as half-empty. The Utopian Nihilist sees a libation suitable for consumption and ponders the history of the grape.
• Eclipse the obstacles. That which is undeniable cannot be denied.
• Do not consternate so much about the creation of art; make it the way that your pristine genesis mind initially bloomed it. Judge not self, lest thee be judged. Employ disregard.
• Vehement resistance to common ideas and swimming against the stream is our moral obligation.
• Democracy is dead, once a beautiful ideology.
• Hierarchies are illusory man-made constructs.
• Happiness is temporal and should be treated as such, knowing that there is also much pain and consternation to be experienced in balance. We are the supersonic Samsara sponge. This is our job as cheerful proletarians. As Utopian Nihilists. To soak up the paradox; to snort up the salt and pepper of things.

As you can see, there’s nothing original there, only the repackaging of things already said. So is Martin’s poetry. You can read the full review of Poems For The Utopian Nihilist here.

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1. The Twitter poem experiment for National Poetry Month went very well. While I wasn’t much impressed with some of the poems I wrote for Twitter distribution, it seems my audience liked them. I appreciate those of you who are now following me as a result of the experiment. You’ll be glad to know that I’m planning to keep it running through May. Twice daily – at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST you can catch my Twitter poems by following me on Twitter.
2. If you haven’t seen the free chapbook, Hardwood, based on the full-length poetry book of the same name by Gary B. Fitzgerald then I encourage you to download it for free along with the Poetry Toolbar. A second chapbook titled Softwood, also by Gary B. Fitzgerald, will soon join it. Download the toolbar for free and get both chapbooks and many other literary goodies.
3. Recent purchases include American Hybrid and Lyric Postmodernisms.

I will write more on this topic in the near future, and I know I still owe you one on vanity publishing, but I just wanted to remark that American Hybrid, edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, appears to be the book that confirms what I’ve been saying on this blog for the last year-and-a-half. The anthology consists of poems that, according to the editors, flow from the preceding poetic traditions of traditional verse and avant-garde poetry, fusing the two into one poetic style that many times is exhibited within the same poem.

While Swensen and St. John call this type of poem a hybrid, I have taken the liberty of calling the movement itself the Millennial School without ascribing a name to the type of poem. I essentially meant the same thing that Swensen says in her introduction, which I’ll quote a piece of in a moment.

When I started this blog in September 2007 I did so with the intent of putting a voice to this direction in poetry, a philosophy I have adhered to since I started writing poetry in the late 1980s when the Right Wing and the Left Wing of American poetics, New Formalism and Language Poetry, respectively, were pounding faces in competition for the Golden Glove. I rejected that neither should prevail and still do. It seems I am not the only one.

My Hybrid Confession
I have not spent much time over the years conversing with other poets about poetics. I am not much of a social being and prefer to keep to myself. Not quite a recluse, but just enough asocial to not be antisocial. I guess, somewhere in between. My point in saying that is that my poetic philosophy has mostly been developed by my own preferences and some observations that I’ve made in the direction of published poetry in the popular journals over the last 20 years. So I am delighted that others have seen the same developments.

Until I started writing this blog I’d never heard anyone speak of the fusion between the traditional and the avant-garde. Ron Silliman speaks of the third wave of poetics and the “post-avant”, but I sense that his meaning is much more constrained than mine. The late Reginald Shepherd, author of Lyric Postmodernisms, defended the same idea on his blog and is one of the poets in Swensen’s and St. John’s anthology.

Here is what Swensen says in her introduction to American Hybrid:

The hybrid poem has selectively inherited traits from both of the principal paths outlined above (traditional and avant-garde). It shares affinities with what Ron Silliman has termed “third wave poetics” and with what is increasingly known as “post-avant” work, though its range is broader, particularly at the more conservative end of its continuum…. Today’s hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a villannelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in ancient traditions.

This is precisely what the Millennial School of Poetics, and the philosophy behind this blog, is based upon. The idea is to learn new techniques from any corner of poetics and employ them into one’s own without prejudice as to form or substance.

Swensen continues:

…hybrid poets access a wealth of tools, each one of which can change dramatically depending on how it is combined with others and the particular role it plays in the composition.

I am currently muddling my way through an epic narrative poem written precisely with these tenets in mind. Titled “The Sandbox”, it is based on my own experience as a soldier-participant in the Iraq War though the setting is post-experience.

I just wanted to share an initial impression of this book after having read the first introduction. I will leave you with these thoughts and return to them later.

Tin House Magazine debuted in 1999. Since then it has been a powerhouse of postmodern poetry while making inroads into a new era. Frankly, I think we’ve moved beyond the postmodern, but some postmodern icons are still represented in the pages of the magazine as evidenced by its recently published anthology.

The anthology is titled Satellite Convulsions: Poetry From Tin House. World Class Poetry has published its honest review and we’d like to share with you our thoughts about it.

Feel free to make up your own mind, but the review of Satellite Convulsions: Poetry From Tin House can be found right here.

For this entry, I will focus just on the simulacra of Simulations and Simulacra in the context of the challenges and opportunities we are faced with in this era in which we live. Simulacra is defined as: copies without an original. Baudrillard cites many examples of this phenomenon in his book, but one version of this phenomenon should be quite familiar to all of us -

• An original event occurs.
• The event becomes a reference point of meaning to its contemporaries.
• Time passes (the amount of time that passes can be surprisingly short), and this event becomes an historical reference point.
• The historical reference point gains new meaning with passing time, and the original meaning is lost, distorted, or completely changed (intentionally or not).

The Politics Of Experience
Consider the recent arguments between Republicans and Democrats about how we overcame the Great Depression. As most of us alive today don’t have direct experience with what happened then, we have to rely on the meaning of the event known as the Great Depression being mediated to us. To understand the meaning of this event, we have a wide variety of places to go to get information and analysis of the event: books, newspapers, television, radio, internet, etc. In fact, even to those who still lived through the Great Depression, their understanding of the event can change based on this overwhelming amount of information available with all of the various interpretations of the information.

The process of understanding this event which has taken on a new meaning in our society becomes, in a practical way, more important than the event itself. The search for truth can be endless, and yet can create more questions and ambiguities at each turn. What can we trust? This sense of ambiguity and the mutability of meaning is what I would like to focus on here in the context of writing.

The Poet’s Responsibility
As poets, our task at all times is to tell a story. For a story to have meaning, it must have a context. And this is where understanding how the simulacra works gives us some food for thought in our writing, and in analyzing the writing of others. Here are some things to consider:

1. Even in our own lives, we are prone to creating and recreating the meaning of events. At the depths of this process, we are making many choices. When I read or write poetry, I examine carefully the reference points that are used and how they function.
2. Common reactions to simulacra are irony, rebellion, alienation, and resignation.
3. Mediation is a process that leads toward simulacra. The more steps between the original event and the last interpretation, the more room for difference. (Sidenote – Television is a deceiving form of mediation because we can feel that we are part of an event when we are getting a very distorted, removed view of it.)
4. Identity is increasingly difficult to grasp, as the context of what makes us who we are gets more complex.

Li-Young Lee: A Postmodern Poet’s Simulacra
Look at this excerpt from Immigrant Blues by Li-Young Lee:

[...]Practice until you feel
the language inside you, says the man.

But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used?

And me, confused about the flesh and soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you?

You’re always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body’s finitude,
at peace with the soul’s disregard
of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart.

If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,
she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,
at peace with the heart’s bewilderment.[...]

Li-Young Lee is an accomplished postmodern writer, tapping into the realm of simulacra regarding his identity as an immigrant and connecting with his fragmented family past. Alienation isn’t new to literature, but what makes it uniquely postmodern in this poem is how Li-Young Lee ironically recognizes the distance and chooses to never reconcile it. The poem ends:

It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening

called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,”

called “Loss of the Homeplace
and the Defilement of the Beloved,”

called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”

Li-Young Lee recognizes that resolution isn’t possible. He knows that ending the poem with new understanding, with a concrete sense of direction isn’t as impactful as the ambiguity that is left in the void of context. This void of context is the context. Starting this section by calling it an “ancient story” but ironically from “yesterday evening” he intentionally blurs the lines. He doesn’t have a concrete connection with his family history or himself – but that lack of connection is something that we can connect to.

How Simulacra Can Be Used To Connect Us
Many postmodern poets are very adept at connecting us to these fissures in context that we have in our lives, and turning those fissures around from points of confusion to points of unity between the reader and the poet. We understand and empathize, and thus, we experience relief from the conundrums of simulacra.

The take away point here is that as a writer – more than at any time in history – recognizing the challenges in understanding anything as being definite can be very helpful in constructing a believable poem that others can connect to.

Will B. is a high school teacher and owner of the blog The Search for Health in Decadence.

1. No poetry.
2. OK, you can print a poem as long as you also provide some kind of intelligent commentary on the poem. It can’t be your poem and you must remain within the guidelines of fair use.
3. You can write about anything as it relates to poetry; I value intelligent commentary from any perspective so feel free to tackle difficult subjects from a unique perspective.
4. Only original material; no reprints. However, you can write about topics you’ve written about elsewhere as long as you don’t use the same exact words and paragraphs except in summary and within quotes.
5. I’m not looking for academic references, though I won’t discriminate if you have them. Blogging is not academic research, but you may rely on academic research to present your ideas.
6. You get a bio with your blog post. A short one, not a CV.
7. Yes, you may promote a couple of your books or chapbooks in your bio (and link to their sales pages).
8. If you have a blog or a website you can link to it, or them. Up to two links allowed. If you’re familiar with SEO practices, this can help you in your search engine rankings and feel free to use your anchor text.
9. No length requirements, but be reasonable.
10. No serial posts allowed. Get it all in one post, but you may guest blog more than once.
11. You don’t have to be a poet, just have something intelligent to say about the state of poetry today, writing poetry, the art of poetics, or some aspect of poetic literature.

That about sums it up. If you have an interest in being a guest blogger at World Class Poetry, register as a user of the site and contact me with your username. I’ll give you contributor rights and you can write as many guest posts as you wish to write up two to twice a month.

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?