Sadly, this is what so many Americans have come to believe is poetry: expressing the banal (“no rain, no rainbow”) with gravitas and, preferably, an upright bass and bongos in the background. This bizarre fusion–of beatnik hauteur, the self-indulgence of Twitter tweets, and the incoherent, wink-to-camera narcissism of Sarah Palin–symbolizes so much of what has gone wrong with our society’s appreciation of the four-thousand-year-old tradition of making art from words.

Entertainment, and especially humor, is virulent online. As the competition for our attention increases, forms of increasingly immediate gratification would seem to be winning out over art. After all, art asks something back from us in precious attention. And, while poetry may well be one of the shortest formats in the literary arts, good poems, unlike good jokes, do more than make us laugh. Often, they emphasize the uncertain and contradictory nature of human existence. At minimum, they challenge our perceptions in some way. And, like most salarymen on a Friday night, I can understand just wanting a good laugh.

However, in a world of increasing fragmentation, poetry also promises to be one of the most coherent forms of address. It is this coherence that I crave, like nutrition. And it is because I believe such a craving to be as fundamentally human as seeking out something green to eat after a long stretch of gorging on junk food–that the propagation of mental junk food in modern times actually encourages, rather than disheartens me.

Such coherence is an antidote to, for example, cheesy politics. What makes Shatner’s sketch funny is the disparity between the trite tweets and the self-seriousness with which he delivers them. Yet there is some degree to which we are expected, by the Palin campaign, to take this same disparity–between Palin and her words–totally seriously. And so, the piece becomes a threefold parody: a caricature of Palin, a send-up of beatnik culture, and a dig at self-importance in the digital age.

Clearly, simply calling a collection of words “poetry” does not make it art, any more than Shatner’s posturings convince us of his seriousness. Yet the term is bandied about online as an ever-cheapening currency–largely, because it seems to be viewed as a form of self-expression. But the poetry that matters, to me anyway, goes beyond that. It speaks to us in ways sound bites, or reality-television-style confessions simply can not. It gets past–not only our email filters and learned habits of incessantly scanning text–but past our perceptual filters as well. A good poem can speak into us in ways that a million tweets can not. And it doesn’t need bongos behind it to make its deep rhythms felt.

As many readers know, I have been a Twitter agnostic for years. Which are centuries in Internet time.

And yet, slowly, I have come around. It started with Goodreads, then Facebook. And today, I discovered enough interesting poets on Twitter (via a reprint of a list originally compiled by Collin Kelley) to reach a tipping point.

There’s not too much difference between Twitter and the IRC chatrooms I frequented in the early ’90s, except that Twitter takes advantage of two new developments: hypertext and mobile devices. But the concept of short, syndicated conversations is basically the same.

I am a different person now than when I was an adolescent trying on virtual personae through clever quips and emoticons. So, why Twitter now? I suppose I re-joined Twitter for the same reason I read and write poetry, and the same reason I started this blog: to be a part of the conversation–about poetry, and life, and what makes us human.

Can a medium so inherently distractable provide such insight? Can we get the news from Twitter, if not from poetry? Will the signal-to-noise ratio prove worthwhile? There is only one way to find out. Commence Twitter experiment number two.

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

I even went so far as to set up a private group for other students, faculty and alumni in the Pacific University MFA program. I figure this could help provide an outlet that is missing from the low-residency format–the opportunity to chat throughout the semester with other students about what we are reading. The results of that experiment remain to be seen.

Shortly after that, however, softened by my recent joinerism, I caved in and signed up for Facebook. It seems I am of a certain generation such that if I want to keep up with some of my friends, I need to be on Facebook. So, there I am–to the chagrin and relief of my wife, who has been reconnecting with friends overseas for some time through Facebook and and attempting to impress its wonders upon me (“Look! I gave someone a garden gnome!”), and a number of friends who have invited me to join up at various times. OK, OK, I’m on–happily reviewing books, posting photos, and turning friends into zombies. How did I ever live without this? Curmudgeon no more.

Related Links:

• Goodreads Profile
• Facebook Profile
• LinkedIn Profile

“Every word was once a poem”

In this so-called information age, we live among language more than ever before. For example, one of the latest fads drawing hype to itself faster than a black hole sucks light is Twitter: a web-based social networking site predicated on “tweets”–brief text messages uploaded to a web site that others subscribe to, follow and read. Thus, the blogging concept of writing for a perceived audience is accelerated to a dizzying pace.

I tried Twittering for a day, sending tweets when I changed my activity or mood. Between the web-based, software-based and cell-phone-based options, I was never disconnected from a sense that I could and perhaps should send an update in case someone out there might actually really care about the excruciatingly mundane details of my life. This is the fundamental promise of the internet, and social networking in particular: the audience that cares. It has been the impetus, since the beginning, for a mind-boggling number of words, from the early days of IRC and BBS systems to a shiny new rehash of the same fundamental drivers and mechanisms, which is now being called Web 2.0.
The trend here is toward quantity–the mythic and sometimes actual possibility of high volumes of reader traffic drives a proportionate amount of new content. This quantity-focused approach to generating textual content can actually change language itself. What, for example, does the word “friend” mean when you can have hundreds, even thousands of them by hustling links to your MySpace account? If the word friend was once a revelation signifying some meaningful connection, it has now, more than ever, become a kind of currency. None of this is unique to Web 2.0, however–such frenzy for words comes as a direct extrapolation from traditional media outlets, which push sound bytes and statistics at a likewise numbing pace.

When I wilfer the internet (new word, thanks Ceri) or channel surf TV, I am in a hyper-browsing mode–scanning and skimming. So, it comes as little surprise that on my own site, a fairly high volume of global daily traffic translates to only a micro-fractional number of comments. Like me, most visitors probably bounce off this site in a matter of seconds. (Especially if they are just looking for material for their next school essay.) This is the major obstacle online creative writing journals have to contend with, and why experiments like Twitter poetry will probably only ever remain as such.

We care about poetry precisely because it exists outside this frenetic word-space. We care about poetry because it represents a kind of necessary antidote to the soul-draining quantification and commoditization of language the information age has brought. All good poems, no matter their style, share this: an enforced attention to language, and some degree of innovation upon it. This runs contrary to the bigger/faster/more pervading everything from network news to the blogosphere. It also helps us to reclaim some of the erosion of nuance caused by the diction of, for example, mass-scale popularity contests (from American Idol to Facebook) which wear away our relationship to any kind of actual self and, in the process, any hope of connecting deeply with one another through words.

Poetry demands attention and subtlety in both reading and writing, and forges a necessarily intimate relationship between reader and author. At its best, it pushes our understanding of the most fundamental element of thought–language itself–in new directions. In this way, it can affect how we understand ourselves and help us to reclaim some awareness of the still small voice that tells what it means to be human. In a world echoing with tweets and stats and sound bytes, our need for poetry has never been greater.

That’s why there will never be a poetry 2.0. The first version still works fine. And when the new has finally worn off all our technobabble, poetry will still be around.