As you may or may not know, I’ve been writing three poems a day at Twitter since December of last year. Over this stretch of time, my practice of daily writing has defined itself into the current form of 1) exactly 140 characters and 2) a linking cycle of repeating the first poem’s second word at the start of the second poem, the second poem’s third word at the start of the third poem and so on and so forth. Thematically, I’ve been working on the history of the development of the internet (RAND, arpanet, etc.) alongside the development of language, writing, modernism and literature (especially in the epic form). I figured that if I was going to be working within a trendy social networking service such as twitter, it would be interesting to contrast that with one of the oldest technologies we have: the written word.
Over the past two weeks, however, I’ve taken a break from these lofty themes of language and epic literature and I’ve just been free-styling it. I’m about to start my Masters at UBC in creative writing and I’ve cut myself a bit of slack to wander thematically through whatever I like.
Today I wrote about the questions one sometimes wakes up with:
name the animals inside,
the beasts wandering wild
& the tame that keep close to surface smiles,
which will bite their names to spit them out?
tame
stray thoughts or
stir
tangents to a swirl?
a thick forest of question marks?
confused animals?
or keep asking until you find your way out
forest
your heart with trees planted
in place of dull silence
so that someday you will be lush with breezes filtering thru thoughts & feelings
Ahh – UBC Creative Writing! Congrats!