Sherry Chandler

I have totally missed MySpace and Facebook, have no desire to own a Blackberry, have no real concept what it means to Digg it!, and I do not do Instant Messaging. I live in a place, after all, where the only way to connect is by modem via telephone. But, thanks to Ceri Radford at the Telegraph, I now know that Twitter:

is a website linking up people who post what they’re doing, moment to moment, in no more than 140 characters. It sort of works on the premise that blogging is too slow and complex – make of that what you will.

A single twitter, apparently, is called a tweet. There are some who would make poetry of Twitterings.

Ceri also defines wilfer for me,

If you followed the link to Twitter but then got distracted by checking your email, the price of a plane ticket to Amsterdam, the weather in London and the availability of an Ikea sofa then you are, like me, a wilfer.

Wilf stands for ‘What Was I Looking For?’, a term which has been coined to describe those who amble absent-mindedly through cyberspace. I am one of them.

I got to all these places via Robert Peake’s blog — was I wilfering? Robert is perhaps not so much a dinosaur about things web as am I, but he is not too sanquine about Twitter poetry:

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?…

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.

I am subcribed to Poetry Daily’s Poet’s Pick feature for National Poetry Month. Today’s poem was Andrew Marvell’s “On a Drop of Dew.” I found it practically impossible to read that poem on my computer screen. I had to make myself stop and read each word, each line out loud (fortunately my office is deserted this morning), noticing where there were commas, periods, puzzling the sense back together. Only after I solved the puzzle could I find joy in the craft.

Marvel’s language is old-fashioned and condensed, so I may have had to do that anyway but I find it practically impossible to read anything that requires close attention on the web, least of all a poem. There is something about the screen, the mouse, the back-lighting that won’t let my eye rest, and so I “hyper-browse.” I wouldn’t call if wilfering because I don’t get distracted from what I went after. I didn’t really go after anything. I’m just browsing for the web equivalent of sound bites.

For me, poetry and the web fight each other. Wonderful to be sent a Marvel poem I probably would not have found on my own, wonderful to have a canny exegesis by J. Allyn Rosser. Awful to have those things on a computer screen.

Why, then, do I blog?

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.

(1922-2007)

I will let others be eloquent for me:

Poesy Galore

Have Coffee, Will Write

Rabbit’s Hidey-Hole