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12:49 PM
Poetry lite
There have always been fashions in poetry and 'schools' that to a greater or lesser extent dominate the poetry of an era..

It seems to me that over the last couple of years or so there's been an upsurge of what I call 'poetry lite' and I find that deeply depressing.

My own instinct is that the effects of texting and Twitter has led to a frame of mind where youngsters in particular find it hard to concentrate or develop any complexity of thought.

The result is that if they write poetry it's in the same style and spirit. There's no ambition in their work, no scope, no depth, no sense of surprise. What the Twitter versifiers produce is predictable, unexciting, unambitious, shallow and on the whole pretty tedious to read..

Instead of poems they give us text messages or at best tweets!

Now there's nothing wrong with brevity. A lot of great poets could usefully have pruned their work.

But when brevity becomes an end in itself it stops being a poetic tool and becomes a fetish and a mannerism

That's what our poetry lite twitterers do. The inarticulateness of many youngsters is clearly reflected in the type of verse they write which is overwhelmingly modelled on text messages and tweets.

What we tend to get presented with is NOT poems but a series of random notes that with a bit more work might perhaps be capable of being worked up into a poem but of themselves are no more interesting than a shopping list or a telephone directory.

So come on, you poetry lite twitterers - put in the hard work you need to do to turn your jottings into a properly realised poem!
Category: Entertainment | Views: 839 | Added by: biglin | Rating: 5.0/2
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