You can’t write poetry on the computer. — Quentin Tarantino

Via harriet, The Poetry Foundation’s blog, comes this piece by Annie Finch on the effect Facebook has had on the versifying demimonde. She regards it as largely positive, because it promotes, as she puts it, “a sense of awareness” of a vast number of other poets, most of whom she admits to never having met. “[T]his morning I clicked on the link, went to the page, and clicked on “invite friends,” Finch writes:

it [sic] took me so long to scroll through everyone and locate some NY poets that I decided to play for a few moments and finally start a Friends list for poets.

Twenty minutes later, my list of poets is at 106 and I’ve barely started with the D’s (just got through the Davids). As I click, each little colorful square and name takes me to a different place. These poets are all over the map in every sense. And weirdly, I feel a connection as I click on each name, even the ones I know only by name. Maybe it’s the photos. Maybe it’s the fact that they are in a little box labelled [sic] “Friends.” Or maybe it’s the way they juxtapose themselves so disarmingly, charmingly, blatantly, bizarrely, dauntingly, hauntingly, with the poets on either sides of them. It’s as if each one feels to some extent like part of my community.

Just what such instantaneous and massive awareness portends is something which Finch pauses to consider. “What does it mean that, for the first time in the history of poetry, a poet can maintain anything like awareness, let alone a sense of connection, to such a gigantic number of other poets?” she writes:

Not only do we have instant access to reading their work online; we can also develop some kind of social awareness of them, whether through meeting them at conferences and readings or simply through browsing facebook updates and youtube clips.

Certainly, in the history of poetry and poets, such awareness is without precedent, and in fact runs counter to the general trend of poetry in the larger culture. Since the advent of the novel — and, later, cinema, radio and television — poetry has found itself under assault with regard to its relevance; a genre expressly devoted to the aesthetic possibilities of its medium, language, appears absurdly out of place in an era of e-mail, text messaging and YouTube.

"Not for all time but of an age": a trio of latter-day poets ply their trade.

Finch, however, betrays no such pessimism on this head. She credits social networking entities like Facebook as holding out unprecedented promise, though on the details of this promise she remains tantalizingly vague. “It’s easy to think of all this potential knowledge as at best a handy tool, or a fun if frivolous toy — and at worst, in grumpy moods, as a consumer of time and energy for no particular reason, or even to fear that the tradeoff in lack of depth and intensity of connection, compared to, say, how well Keats knew his small handful of poet-friends, is detrimental to useful interaction and poetic growth,” she admits:

But I don’t believe it. As I clicked on the names and faces of poets and thought about what I know of each one’s work and life and aesthetic goals, prizewinners and students and even the deceased (hi Craig!), perfpos and langpos and newfos, all merrily juxtaposed by the great equalizer of the alphabet, I was moved. Humbled. Awed. This is something new in the life of poetry, and I’m excited to be part of it and to see where it may take us.

We at Generation Bubble believe that, if contemporary existence is notable for any one thing, it is the contraction of language — and, more significantly, language skills — which televisual, telecommunicational and computerized media have conspired to bring about. Vocabularies shrink, misspelling reigns, grammar disintegrates, the subjunctive mood disappears — and through it all smallspeak ascends unimpeded to the status of the demotic. One need only consult Lindsay Lohan’s recently intercepted tweet du coeur or any post by Hipster Runoff’s Carles to see that, in terms of being able to express themselves, Americans are one step away from hoots, whistles and feces-flinging (if indeed they’re not at this point already).

But who knows? Maybe the future folio edition of some “perfpo,” “langpo” or “newfo” will not only look really sharp on living room shelf but will also transport us with flights of txt-msg verse –

2 B/not 2 B . . .