tweets penyeach

1024px-TomScholz

“Here is our poetry,” proclaimed Ezra Pound in 1910, “for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”

He was talking about lightbulbs.

Poor poetry. It can’t just be the highest form of speech. It has to trail clouds of metaphorical gas.

And so Virginia Heffernan, in a “3 min” at Medium, declares tweets to be poems and heralds a new “Age of Poetry”:

Asking what’s to become of poetry in the age of Twitter is like asking what’s to become of music in the age of guitars. It thrives. It more than thrives; it grows metastatically, invasively, inoperably. Poetry on the Internet has shot far past relevancy through indispensability and finally to vaporization. Poetry is the air we damn breathe.

My, that’s chewy prose. It’s like eating a raw lamb shank.

I’m as fond of the tweetform as the next aphorist manqué, but do we really have to drag poetry into it? Let tweets be tweets. Whatever the air we damn breathe, poetry it’s damn not.

Image of Boston’s Tom Scholz in the age of guitars: Wikipedia.

3 thoughts on “tweets penyeach

  1. Christoffer

    Spot on. Thanks, Nick. And voila, my opinion uttered in just 22 characters – not counting these last few elaborating sentences, of course, but then again, who’s counti

  2. Laraine

    Except for the tweet, excuse me, poem at the end, I notice she doesn’t offer many, actually any, examples of all those aphorisms, poems, maxims, epigrams, etc that are filling the twittersphere.

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