Facebook « Black Clock

Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’—

The Soul of a Man

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

Internet Found Poem

no, they have not split
_______________ (the cork
_______________ & the dumb thumb)
real slick
_____twit-spank
__________shake it
_______________ like a shiny new mohawk
heading to rock sugar
an exciting underwear purchase
____________________ driving by an escalade
____________________ _______________ with the license plate: FNG SHUI
____________________ another harlem nocturne
____________________ _______________ like the periphery
____________________ she found her passport
____________________ she is just getting over the h1n1 flu
____________________ she almost missed the vermeer milkmaid at the met
____________________ she misses having even the slightest bit of discipline
____________________ she is eating dried mangos
____________________ she has skater boy hair
____________________ she thinks life is too short for a long story
____________________ ______________ (alternatively, the end is near, but not near enough)
____________________ she doesn’t want to hear any songs about sexin’ hos in a club bathroom
____________________ she wants to rollerdisco in central park
____________________ _________________________ all afternoon
____________________ i found a way
____________________ i found a reason
_________________________ getting sandwiches to go
____________________ i found love on a two way street
____________________ i just want to meet you
____________________ i found god on the corner of 1st and amistad
____________________ wearing a low cut green shirt, glasses, black jacket
____________________ the things that hold me hostage in this city are close to saving me
____________________ ready set go
____________________ shame
____________________ _____ is it the future?
____________________ soul
____________________ & apartment cleansing

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

According to the Academy of American Poets, found poetry is the “literary equivalent of a collage.” The Found Poetry Project publishes found poetry and expounds on the definition, asserting that “poetry is everywhere…every phrase that rings in our minds, every two words that sound good together, every quote we want to remember, are each their own small poems.” The process of constructing a found poem differs for each “poet,” or “finder,” but here is the gist: gather existing text, rearrange it, and present it as a brilliant new piece of poetry.

I am constantly intrigued by the amount of losing and finding that takes place in the construction and result of a found poem. Lost snippets of text, often from various sources, find new context. Original sources of phrases and lines are often lost on readers, and eventually on writers as well. Old meanings and contexts are co-opted, colonized, contaminated, altered, exalted, exaggerated. Lines, words, and phrases intermingle and find other newly contextualized word friends, acquaintances, and enemies.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

In order to highlight the interaction between lost and found imagery, I drew my sources from several types of internet media to construct this found poem.

Not surprisingly, the internet has proven itself as both a boon and a bane in the world of found poetry. Some poets and poem finders have embraced the medium. Most ignore it. And still a large contingent of poets mock it and use the internet satirically. “Flarf,” a genre of experimental-internet-search-engine poetry, is an example of how the internet has been invading and/or livening poetic spaces for the past decade. Flarf is, of course, completely controversial, as evinced in the discussions generated at Art Voice, Poets & Writers, and on the Poetry Foundation Journal.

Despite the unending debates about the value of the internet in poetry and society, one thing most people can agree on is the ephemeral nature of the medium, particularly on social media websites. As a frequent user of social media sites, I am amazed by how quickly I can watch various status updates appear on my news feed, only to get buried beneath a new flurry of information minutes later. As easy as it is to find information on the internet, it takes little effort to completely lose information as well.

I wanted to explore those sentiments in my found poem. To represent the ephemeral and lost, I incorporated status updates from popular social media websites Twitter.com and Facebook.com, as well as postings from other fast-paced, rapidly updated sites perezhilton.com and craigslist.org. In contrast, I used a google.com search on the phrase “I found.”

I let the process of gathering phrases and words guide the tone and eventual focus of the poem. I did searches on all the aforementioned websites and copied down the phrases that popped out at me the most. As I went along, I became more discerning in what phrases to collect, and I picked things that seemed to fit most aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually with what I had already gathered.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

In the finished product, I hoped for the newly intermingling, random phrases to be able to interact with newfound meaning and cohesiveness. As the poem’s finder, I was fairly pleased with the result, as I was able to connect with the whole piece in a different way than I connected to the individual phrases I borrowed. In many ways, I felt like a co-author/co-poet, and I emerged with a newfound respect and understanding for the genre of found poetry. While I can certainly understand why found poetry may be a turnoff or considered not engaging or simply unimpressive for many readers – after all, the words and phrases themselves do not belong to the authors – I do think that we often don’t give found poetry enough of a chance. After going through the process myself, I realize that poem finders can have quite a bit of agency and creative control in the construction of a found poem. I also discovered that found poetry and “traditional” poetry have more in common than I previously assumed; in found poetry, we lift exact words and phrases from various sources, but in other forms of poetry, do we not “lift” a smattering of observations, anecdotes, vignettes, and even words and phrases from a variety of people and places as well? In a way, found poetry seems to me a more direct, literal exemplification of what we often consider poetry to be.

by Chrysanthe Tan
a singer-songwriter, actor, violinist, poet, Pisces, and Star Wars enthusiast

Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’—

The Soul of a Man

Internet Found Poem

{Contents}

{Search}

{Authors}

{We Like}

{Archives}