Whether you love it or hate it, the mobile phone has become an essential part of everyday living to the extent that even your grandparents have one. Okay, so they may have to sellotape numbers on the facia or are yet to work out how to download Vera Lynn as a ringtone, but they still have one. Naturally, this has led to a variety of moral panics, of which texting has caused the greatest furore. On one level, texting is criticised as a cold factual form of communication which when used to inform of a dumping or redundancy is callousness in the extreme. For others, texting is seen as some kind of linguistic dystopia, further evidence of the dumbing-down process by which youth (and now the elderly) are eternally doomed. But wait! Before you throw your Nokia into the
It is perhaps of no surprise then that texting has been a motivating force, whether negatively or positively, for numerous publications. There are two collections in particular I would like to look at. The first is Text Messages by Andrew Wilson which features eighty nine poems, each, like the standard text message, no more than one hundred and sixty characters long. This was a gutsy move by publisher Smith/Doorstep, an imprint of the Poetry Business, as taking something as interactive as a text message to the static confines of the page was always going to be a risk.
Fortunately,
In the station bar
gangs of girls meet for a night out.
Men in suits head home.
They don’t notice me
in the corner
missing train after train
The key to the success of this poem and others is in maximising all narrative devices to full effect, which
If I were to be harsh with this collection I would describe it as poor man’s Haiku. Top-up rather than a monthly contract, purely based on the lack of interactivity which the book form offers rather than a reflection on
The mobile phone has always been promoted as offering mobile privitisation yet this is a little disingenuous as if anything, it allows constant access to consumers by marketing companies. There are currently numerous competitions taking advantage of this new art form which I don’t intend to promote here. Each entails texting in a 160 character poem but instead of paying twelve pence for the privilege it’s more like one pound. As always democratic participation depends upon how many pennies you have in the wallet and with X-Factor screaming for your attention, there’s not much left.
Generation TXT on the other hand have taken the negative effects of modern technology, the dumbed-down media and incomprehensible text-speak, as a platform from which to pour beauty onto the world. And boy do they do it. Having spent many hours in the bath, on buses and on park benches, I still cannot decide which extract to use, so impressed was I with the collection that I did not want to promote one author over another. So instead I politely request that readers check out the links below and listen to the podcasts and decide for themselves.
What I can tell you is that Generation TXT is a poetry collection from Penned in the Margins, a
The collection covers subjects as diverse as jellyfish, skinny-fit jeans, urban regeneration, tea smuggling and suicide. There is quite literally something for everyone, which probably explains why the six gifted young poets were able to back the book up with a national tour of fourteen venues. Although
To celebrate these two collections, please log on to the creative writing forum and start to upload your own poems, be it one hundred and sixty characters or one million. The best of which will be published in the next magazine. To get you going, here is an abbreviated extract from Emma McGordon’s brilliant ‘The Scary Thing About People Who Jump’
The scary thing about somebody
Jumping from the top of a tall building
Is not the fall or the jump itself
Or the rush of air that chokes
Into being ha person’s last breath.
It is not even the man, on his way to work,
Who finds he seven body parts
Spread across six paving stones.
…..
It is the look on their face as they choose
Which coat to wear
And it is the way they closed their blue front door
Knowing that they had no need to take a key
Vital Statistics
Title: Generation Txt
Editor: Tom Chivers
Publisher: Penned in the Margins 2006,
Pages: 78
Price: £6.99
ISBN: 0-9553846-1-3
Title: Text Messages
Author: Andrew Wilson
Publisher: Smith/Doorstep 2003
Pages: 96
Price: £5
ISBN: 190238251x