O! that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a tweet…
If poet Bob Wallace (1932-1999) had lasted a bit longer, he would've been seen as the prophet he truly was. Working at home in Cleveland on an old Chandler & Price printing press, he founded Bits Press in the mid-'70s, publishing chapbooks (including my Rat Poems, illustrated by Jeanne) and a magazine, Bits, fueled by the idea that Americans were losing the ability to read poems any longer than 12 lines. He'd have laughed, ruefully, at the emergence of our latest rage, the Twitter poem, limited to 140 characters.
On first hearing about "Twitter poems," I was put off by the name, imagining not the pleasant chirping of birds but the inane chatter of people we used to call "twits" — lightweight chatterboxes. I admit this is unfair. There have always been terrific Twitter-length poems, like the anonymous 16th-century lyric "Western Wind": Westron wynde, when wylle thow blow, / The smalle rayne down can rayne? / Cryst, yf my love were in my Arms / And I yn my bed a gayne.
Still, it's no accident that, in a list of favorite poems in the English language, very few of them are that short. We seem to need at least a dozen lines to set forth a complex thought or feeling, which is why the sonnet (14 lines) is alive and well. The sonnet fits English the same way the haiku fits the more pictorial Chinese and Japanese languages. Asian poets can say a lot more in 17 syllables — or 140 characters — than we can. With most American short poems, I nod and think, OK, but — that's it? (One way around it: some writers are writing Twitter poems or haiku in sequences — but that's defeating its original purpose of brevity.)
Unfortunately, Twitter poems encourage our increasing preference for speed in all areas: it's a sound bite of a poem, fast food for the mind. Skip the opera, play the arias. Shorten the field, for faster scoring in the Arena League. Da-da-da DUM, and we've got Beethoven's Fifth. Mona Lisa's smile, God's pointing finger, Venus' flowing hair: great square inches of art. I think we need to take a deep breath, slow down, and widen our gaze.
But slowing down goes against our contemporary grain. Everything's faster, except for commercials (well, they seem long). In the old days — saith the old codger — we didn't have to check our typewriter every five minutes to see if someone's typed us back. The Twitter poem suits our decade, possibly our century. We have less "free" time. Despite having poet laureates on all civic levels — city, state, country — poetry itself, which has to be read slowly, has been relegated to the dustiest corners of the bookstores. If you hear someone sneezing, she's probably over in the shadows, poring over a faded paperback by Sylvia Plath.
Still, the Twitter poem encourages cleverness and wit, as in this one by Robert Pinsky, America's Poet Laureate a few years back, who recently read at USF: The fifth-grade teacher and her followers— / Five classes, twenty-eight in each, all hers: / One-hundred-and-forty different characters. Robert Wallace would approve. So the Twitter poem can remind us that the power of poetry, like the power of the genie, comes from its compression: no bottle, no genie. Keats advised Shelley to "Load every rift with ore."
I just don't think most Twitter poems can carry the load.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time:
. . . Out, out, brief Twitter.
—Both quotations by Biff Shakespeare (2011)
Peter and Jeanne Meinke don't tweet. They have matching cell phones and serious plans to charge the batteries.
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 2011.