Two events this week have made me think about the future of written communication. First, the college e-mail server was out of commission for nearly 36 hours, leading to widespread panic among people incapable of imagining other methods of communicating; and second, I read A Wild Perfection: Selected Letters of James Wright, which offers a reminder of the depth and breadth of information that ordinary people once regularly conveyed by means of letters. I love the way the poet's voice comes through in even the most mundane passages, transforming ordinary events into luminous lyrical moments.
Collections of letters provide a quirky but compelling glimpse into the lives of long-dead authors, but what will happen in the future when the written letter disappears and scholars are left with scattered e-mail messages, Twitter feeds, and Facebook status lines--some corrupted, some deleted, some lost in internet limbo? Ye shall know me by my bytes.
Which is not to say that electronic communication is worthless. Indeed, tweets and e-mails may acquire a poetic compression of expression, as in this brief excerpt from an e-mail message:
Cold enough here
for a cold-weather coat,
which is what I didn't take
when I walked the dog past hail
in those small vales and gullies
in the park beside the library.
Or this brief but colorful Facebook status line:
Sun streaming
through yellow leaves
and the scent
of autumn.
--Both borrowed from private or public messages and simply formatted to look like poetry.
Today's challenge: manipulate a passage from an electronic message to make visible the poetry hiding within the bytes.
1 comment:
From a missionary:
I did not know
How anything was done,
Where things were,
How to communicate.
Having such a sense of
My inadequacy –
I told the Lord that He had Obviously chosen the wrong person.
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