Poetry Superhighway Poet of the Week

Along with Romanian poet Marius Surleac, I was selected as poet of the week on Poetry SuperHighway this week.

The mission of the Poetry Super Highway is "to expose as many people to as many other people's poetry as possible."

• Poetry Superhighway also maintain an exhaustive set of poetry resources and links, 
• and a long list of on-line poetry publications
• and links to individual poets' web pages

And for those poets who like entering into contests, I'll point out that Poetry SuperHighway has an upcoming poetry contest with deadline coming up on October 5.  It is a fee contest-- but the fee is pretty nominal (one dollar!), and all the money collected goes to the prizes, so they're not making a profit off the poets.

Poe-"Twee"?

Backing off from the controversy for just a moment now, I’d like to talk about a very serious topic:

Twitter.

Chalk up one more seemingly useless social networking site next to the already existing plethora of uselessness to which I subscribe—MySpace, Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MyFace, SpaceBook…And now, I’ve given in and joined Twitter.

[My apologies to those who haven’t signed up for one or more of these and have no idea what the heck the rest of this blog is about. You have my utmost admiration for not falling into such black holes cleverly disguised as “social networks”. Please feel free to stop reading this right now, go grab a cup of tea, put your feet up, and snuggle with an old-fashioned book or some re-runs of House. The rest of you, who have fallen to the seductive wiles of Facebook and her ilk right along with me, please keep reading.]

Twitter seemed useless to me. It’s like your Facebook or MySpace “status”…but without the Facebook or MySpace that goes WITH the status updates. I didn’t understand. That is, until I became addicted to reading the updates of celebrities (and quasi-celebs) like Neil Gaiman, Jimmy Fallon, Steve Poltz, Jason Mraz, Dave Barnes, Darnell Levine…

Some people have truly turned the “status update” into an art form. A new, technology-necessitated art form, but an art form nonetheless. One that is text-based. And short.

See where I’m going with this, poets?

Poetry is supposed to be the most condensed form of literature. So, do you think we can condense it to 140 characters or less [the length limit for any Twitter post]. I’ve recently attempted to post a handful of cinquain and other short poems in my status on Facebook and Twitter. Why not pick a week (maybe this summer) when we all decide to post short poems—be they haiku, cinquain, or other short verse—in our status updates?

In an era of lamentation over the increasing legitimacy of a sentence like, “wat r u 4 2nite?” why not make an attempt at infusing a bit of literacy back into technology? Just once, maybe we could, enmasse, attempt to update our status (stati?) with something a bit more worthwhile than, “Jane is…going to the gym before dinner.” Maybe this could be the new, updated version of various poetry postcard projects that exist out there. After all, the point behind the postcard projects is that the art is viewable and accessible to anyone and everyone, in much the same way that a status update is viewable by just about anyone on the internet, all over the world (depending on your privacy settings, of course).

Thoughts? Or am I just being naive?