Texting is the new poetry

Texting is the new poetry, and that doesn’t bother me.

If you flinched at that statement, tell me: “y?”

For centuries, prolific writers have been crapping out ill-thought poetry under the guise of artistic license like, my personal favorite, Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” How the hell can you go “along” a watchtower? It’s a tower – it’s circular.

Texting is one of the few ways we escape that bias; it has no pretenses. By texting, we do that while using a much broader medium at the same time. I’m talking about emojis as well as words and acronyms, and let’s throw in Twitter, for good measure.

Poetry is the language of feeling. What would you call texting? If texting isn’t the closest thing we have to literary, uninhibited feeling today, then I don’t know what is.

I’ll concede though, that sometimes the process may be similar to sneezing out a story. But the irony isn’t lost on me that most of the flak texting takes is from the Beat generation. Do they think Kerouac liked sitting at his desk for three weeks straight?

Because poetry is feeling, modern poetry tends to be short – a concentrated flash meant to stun you into catharsis. For your viewing pleasure, here are some poems and other literary works that come in under 140 characters:

Ezra Pound’s 14-word “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story:

Baby shoes, for sale, never worn.

Jesus Christ’s last words:

“Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.”

And poetry loves words, too – big words, sometimes. But how could you love a word more than by making it up?

I c ur “superannuated,” n raise u 1 “lol.”