i’ve got too many girlfriends
who’d be cool chicks if they weren’t such cunts
Ah, bowl of dicks,
they mean nothin, baby.
It was Halloween on the blue Nile, you know how it gets.
i’ll deposit the pictures i took in my spank bank.
the female form looks best behind a shower curtain.

i feel worse than i’ve ever felt.
____________________ all i want is whiskey cigarettes and records. and to not wake up tomorrow.
____________________ dear lord, give me the strength to get the fuck out of town
____________________ and by strength i mean money.
____________________ pick me up take me out fuck me up.

____________________ if i could only put the wood to a quality broad
____________________ then get breakfast and clean laundry
____________________ then i’d be ready
____________________ to rape and pillage the world

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

Lyric poetry as it is currently defined – a brief, polished statement of intense emotion – was a form cemented in the Romantic period of the 19th century. Lyric poetry existed long before that, of course; some of the oldest extant examples of Greek verse were considered “lyric,” in that they were short pieces composed for accompaniment with a lyre. The form originated among ancient writers who wished to spurn the grandiose requirements of the epic form, or the tight constraints of the elegy or trochaic and iambic, which were public forms, written for recitation at specific occasions. The lyric poem as private expression reached its apotheosis in the sonnets of Shakespeare, and was subsequently popularized by a roster of immortals: poets like John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Goethe, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Baudelaire. Where is the lyric form now, though? The Modernists reviled the form, and while it was briefly revived in the confessional works of mid-century writers like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, it has certainly fallen out of fashion among the vanguard of compositional practice. My hypothesis is that, while lyric poetry no longer dominates the institutionalized study or practice of the art of poetry, lyrical expression has seeped irrevocably into the mainstream of popular culture, through the prevalence of outlets like twitter and the facebook “status update.”

Venues like these have opened up an avenue of personal expression in which the sharer displays to the world their private thoughts, joys, torments, or inanities. A constriction is placed upon length, and the well-crafted status update can grant an air of import to the most banal of everyday occurrences. That anyone should consider their own private thoughts worthy of public consumption has always been the motivating force behind lyric composition. As such, the rolling status update can be seen as a sort of fragmented lyric poem, an ongoing exposition of crafted, emotive sharing. My purpose in this experiment is to display this through the creation of poem comprised entirely of another person’s status updates. The intent in utilizing an anonymous person’s outpourings is to showcase the lyricism inherent in this form, without falling back on artificial poesy.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I chose a single person from my “friends” whose status updates are often evocative or amusing. Using Facebook’s archives of this person’s posts (nothing ever disappears from Facebook) I traveled back through the months and extracted updates according to whim. Once I had amassed a certain amount  of material, I arranged a poem. Not a single word has been cut from or added to the original updates.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

Profundity is everywhere. The final product revealed, in concentrated form, the thought cycles and relative emotional state of the updater.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles