Are Emerging Technologies Changing How We Write Poetry?

Contributing blogger @rosietypewriter lives near London when not inhabiting a book and is an avid conversationalist, creative writer, and poet-in-training.

A very quick Twitter survey demonstrated that I'm not alone in thinking that technology, such as Twitter itself, is changing the amount of time we are willing to spend on ‘indoors’ leisure activities such as writing poetry. In a previous post, John has already commented briefly on how poetry is evolving ‘to fit its new environment’ through such traditional forms as the haiku.

What about six-word stories, though? Found under #sixwords or #sixwordstory, they may have been initially inspired from Hemingway’s famous six-word story: ‘For sale: Baby shoes, never used,’ and are another form of expression currently finding a new audience. Most #sixwords make for a brilliant and brief line of poetry. Hemingway’s own would fit comfortably (without the need for shorthand) four times in a 140 character Tweet, with twelve characters (space for ‘RT@Hemingway’ perhaps?) to spare.

We can also look at Ezra Pound’s work. Not the formidable series of cantos which, though unfinished, constitute a book-length poem, but this much shorter poem:

‘In a Station of the Metro.’
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

These 100 characters (including punctuation) for me constitute one of the most poignant poems I’ve read to date, recalled as often when traveling on the underground as when sitting beneath a tree. Haikus and six-word stories are not the only way to pack poetry into 140 characters, then, and though technology like Twitter offers a snapshot of a poet’s life and/or works (interchangeable as they can sometimes be) it seems like this effort to hone words into the most compact of spaces is not a new one.

As John pointed out in Monday’s post, when we have less time to complete tasks, it is natural to find quicker ways to complete them in satisfactory ways, unless you are willing to sacrifice quality for brevity. With #poetry hashtags becoming more common, and things like #writerschat making it into the trending topics (as it did yesterday), it seems poets today are taking to the 140 character limit with the same fervour that Petrarca and Shakespeare took to the limits of the sonnet.

I wonder what results could be achieved by marrying haiku successfully with the six-word stories, for instance if the second line of a haiku contained six words whilst upholding the haiku’s syllabic frame (most often, for the second line, of 7 syllables). What if haikus were built around the one-line, six-word, seven-syllabled story? This could be an easy and quick way to collaborate with others. What do you think?