When Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote in 2011 that ‘the poem is a form of texting … it’s the original text’, Oxford Professor of Poetry Geoffrey Hill responded in a lecture by saying that he ‘would not agree that texting is a saying of more with less, and that it in this respect works as a poem.’ Hill compared texting to ‘the old ticker-tape machine’ or ‘the breaking news which runs at the foot of the screen on the BBC news channel’ and made the point that ‘texting is linear only. Poetry is lines in depth designed to be seen in relation or in deliberate disrelation to lines above and below.’ God knows what he thinks about Twitter.
Initially, part of what put me off was the name itself, which rhymes (often aptly) with titter, bringing to mind celeb gossip and other giddy ephemera; the fact that its 140-character-limitation was somehow perceived as a virtue seemed gimmicky and absurd.
Plenty of ephemera on Twitter of course, along with everything else from vital witness reportage to POTUS statements, updates from Wall Street to Occupy.com, Vatican News to the latest on the LHC’s search for the God Particle. So poetry, naturally, is in the mix.
I am not sure exactly why I eventually decided to open a Twitter account, but I had become acquainted with the prolific poet and translator George Szirtes on Facebook and was intrigued that he finds time and inclination to tweet, as do poets/critics such as David Wheatley, Ian Duhig, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ailbhe Darcy, Michael Symmons Roberts and far too many others to mention.
Poetry news (and gossip) is as abundant as any other kind, but is Twitter useful beyond that, as a semi-formal restriction? The best poetry is usually what Auden said it is: memorable speech, and in order to qualify as a poem, most speech needs a vehicle or container, formal or informal. Twitter has added to the variety of poetic possibilities, but is it a form? Unlike a sonnet’s volta / gear-change or a villanelle’s tightly plaited repetitions and rhymes, a tweet can contract to almost nothing or expand to fill its letterbox of space.
Maybe call it an empty form then, a cast, a box with precise dimensions but endless possibilities, like those plywood tea chests that used to occasionally end up in someone’s garage or garden in the 1970s: waist-high and sturdily built, the outside edges protected by thin, riveted metal strips, inner walls lined with foil. Inside, there was always an aromatic trickle of dry, black tealeaves at the bottom. Whenever you moved the chest these hissed like musical sand. Solid but hollow building blocks, child-sized compartments, lookouts, hiding places, readymade extensions for tree-houses, a crow’s nest in the leaves, boxes are what you make of them. This is the beauty of Twitter, its arbitrariness: an apparently utilitarian space anyone can climb into, make themselves at home.
Poets have also made use of Twitter’s dailiness, its suitability for pocket-diary-sized entries. Conor O’Callaghan’s collection, The Sun King, ends with a 52-poem sequence called The Pearl Works. Each of these 140-character couplets finds a new way of hailing the sun. They were originally published as they evolved during 2012, as one tweet per week on O’Callaghan’s Twitter page. Here’s a sample:
Sun king, king of evening gold, forgive me being this spaced.
Forgive me all this solitude I love. Forgive me all the life I have misplaced
Note the multiple meanings of that word, spaced: spaced as in confined to a tweet, spaced as in bordered/surrounded by inner white (and outer black) space, spaced as in spaced-out (dreamy, lost, etc.); a word embodying Keats’s negative capability, that came into being as a direct response to the tweet’s specific limitations.
Novelists have experimented with Twitter. Jennifer Egan’s ingenious spy novel, Black Box, was serialised on Twitter then published in The New Yorker. You can read it here. Other possibilities are the one-off prose poem or micro-story. Four examples (from a series called Ten Second Tales):
Once upon a time there was no dawn to vanish into with a handkerchief full of belongings: no road, no handkerchief, no time. Only once upon
They found her car in the quarry: scarf tied round a tree, a shallow grave, no body, lipstick, glasses, a note saying Sorry
After he said ‘there are no ghosts’ the house didn’t creak or the candle hiccup, but I couldn’t look at his eyes, in case she jumped out
Ever been woken in a big strange bed? By a drop of rain on your eyelid, a twig snapping? In a forest clearing? By someone quickly returning
As Norman MacCaig once said, ‘I like small things.’ There is always room, in such a miniature theatre, for shadow-play, punning, puppetry, frivolity, lightness. Which brings me to the title of this piece, Twittering Machine, a response to Paul Klee’s painting of that name:
Tweet
Ever clever
in all weathers
Paul Klee’s Twittering
Machine’s perched
on a hurdy-gurdy
tickling tree
in a forest
of feathers
Here are just a few poets and poetry/festival sites/magazines you might like to look at. There are new courses at the Irish Writers’ Centre in the early months of 2016 (see below) and don’t forget to check out the upcoming Mountains to the Sea Festival @MountainstoSea, incorporating Poetry Now, in March.
George Szirtes: always interesting, whether airing new poems, talking politics, photography, art, etc is @george_szirtes
B O D Y: a Prague-based English-language poetry webzine, featuring both well-known and upcoming poets of all ages and nationalities. Worth submitting work to also, though make sure you spell the name correctly (with spaces between each letter): @bodylit
Poetry Daily: the US website has been around for quite a few years now, publishing a new poem every day: @Poetry_Daily
Verse Daily: Similar to Poetry Daily: @versedailypoems
And Other Poems’: Like B O D Y, Josephine Corcoran’s poetry webzine is always worth reading, and submitting to: @And_OtherPoems
Poetry Magazine (Chicago): This century-old American magazine has a big online presence and offers plenty of links. The editor, Don Share, publishes all kinds of poetry, from formal/lyric to post-avant/experimental and they have a huge online archive you can browse: @poetrymagazine
The Irish Writers’ Centre: I’ve worked and taught here on and off for many years and it’s great to see the place undergoing a kind of renaissance under the management of Valerie Bistay. Always good for links, courses, readings, etc.. Many interesting courses and readings coming up in the new year, including my own long-running New Irish Communities and a new one, Poetry & Prose: @IrishWritersCtr
Poetry Ireland: Publishes the excellent Poetry Ireland Review (present editor Vona Groarke): @poetryireland
(c) Mark Granier
Mark Granier is a writer and photographer. He has published four collections of poetry: Airborne (Salmon Poetry, 2001), The Sky Road (Salmon, 2007), Fade Street (Salt, 2010) and Haunt (Salmon, 2015). Recent poems in anthologies include World English Poetry, edited by Sudeep Sen (Bengal Publications, India, 2015), Once Upon A Place (Little Island, 2015) and If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (Dedalus, 2014)
Prizes include the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize in 2004 and a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in 2011. He currently teaches Creative Writing for UCD’s Adult Education programme and at The Irish Writers’ Centre.
Mark Granier’s photography has regularly appeared in The Guardian/Observer Weekend Magazine, and the journal Irish Pages published a portfolio of his work in 2011. In 2012 he was awarded the jury prize in the Open House Photographic competition, run by the Irish Architecture Foundation. In 2015 his work was selected by Mark St. John Ellis (of nag Gallery, Dublin) to appear in an open submission competition and exhibition, Home, in the new Municipal Gallery in The Lexicon library, Dún Laoghaire. He was also awarded runner-up prize in this competition.
Mark Granier tweets at: @MarkGranier
He also occasionally blogs at: http://www.markgranier.blogspot.ie/
You can buy his latest collection, Haunt, from Salmon Poetry
Two poems from the collection can be read at:
