If there is meaning in life, then there must also be poetry. Whether you like it or not.

Some of us like it more than others. Many of us were brought up to think of poetry as an inaccessible creature, something belonging to smug self-involved intellectuals who dressed badly and had even poorer social skills than the average computer geek. (Completely unrelated question: Do computer security geeks – like me – count as being more or less geeky than regular computer geeks?)

High school has a way of making people think that way. It turns out that a large part of this may be the result of the way poetry is taught, rather than the poetry itself. It’s just a fact of life that many of us, particularly males (and, according to a survey I read once, political conservatives) are more likely to enjoy Rudyard Kipling than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet English teachers are far more likely to use the second as examples of great poetry than the first. Such is life.

So we learn that poetry is for the elite. Those of us who don’t belong to the elite probably won’t understand the stuff anyway, so why bother?

That sort of disconnect from literary poetry was the subject of a terrific blog post I found the other day at the Poetry and Culture blog about Dashiell Hammett and poetry (here). Since I’m a poet (these days) and Hammett is one of my favorite authors, I had to read it. The post gave several examples of Hammett’s main character expressing less than positive feelings about not just written poetry but the entire idea that there is anything poetic in life.

Well, a hard boiled detective might find life’s poetry to be a bit rough around the edges, wouldn’t he?

By complete coincidence, I began experimenting recently with noir poetry – poetry from the point of view of a hard boiled detective in the midst of a murder investigation. I found this hard to write and so far impossible to sell, though it’s too soon to declare a verdict on that. A search of Google turned up a couple of instances of it in the past, though always referring to the movies, not the books or stories. Noir does not yet seem to be an established genre like science fiction poetry, or even cowboy poetry. Maybe it’s too narrow a field to be worth it. I’ve had fun trying so far.

Incidentally, I found the Poetry and Popular Culture blog because someone posted a link to a nice article there about science fiction poetry (here). When I discovered a few years ago that science fiction poetry was an established (albeit small) genre and that people might even pay me for it, my attitude towards all poetry changed, almost instantly. You mean there’s poetry even for someone like me? Why didn’t my English professors ever mention? I might have started writing the stuff decades earlier if those esteemed experts hadn’t worked so hard (admittedly unintentionally) to discourage me from liking poetry.

Oh well. Let that be a lesson to me: There’s poetry out there for everybody, even people who don’t think much of poetry and who don’t like the stuff that wins awards. (not including the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling award. I often like the winner of that one).

Meanwhile, I tried an experiment last week. I made a Google Wave and put a couple of stanzas from an unfinished fantasy poem in it. Wave is an interesting technology, part email, part instant messenger, part something that runs applications (but not really an operating system).  It is decidedly cutting edge on the web today. Like anything brand new, it has not yet found it’s place. It is still by invitation only (I think). A lot of people still haven’t heard of it and, even among those who have accounts, most people are unsure what to do with it.

I thought it would be interesting to find out if it would be useful for poetry collaborations. It seems like it should be but who knows? So I sent an email to a poetry mailing list inviting all members to collaborate with me on the poem I started in the wave. I told them that I would share the wave with anyone who had an account and some interest in collaborating. And anyone who wanted to collaborate but didn’t have a wave account, I would send them an invitation (note: Anyone reading this post is invited to take advantage of the same offer).

No takers, so far. This might mean that even science fiction poets are, in general, not very up on technology. It could also mean they’ve read my poetry and would rather not get involved. Wave sounds to me like a fine platform for exactly this kind of collaboration. But what do I know about poetry?

I read a few articles this week about the 60th anniversary of the George Orwell novel 1984 (including this interesting one at National Review Online) and one thing that struck me is that very few literary works get reviewed 60 years after their publication. Even fewer good ones get reviewed/taught/discussed 60 years later. Everybody knows at least a little about 1984, even those of us who have not yet read it (In school, I was in the class that was assigned Animal Farm instead. Interesting book. Hated the pigs).

But this is not a review of 1984. That would be silly since I just admitted I haven’t read it! But it seems I should. Traditionally, reading has been seen as a way of passing on culture – not the kind of culture that causes people to donate money to the opera or spend time at museums but the kind that shapes the way people think. That’s why an old fashioned Classical Education valued Socrates and Thomas Aquinas among others. Agree with them or not, these were smart people and excellent teachers.

Well, that’s the official story, anyway.

It’s interesting that the list of important books for a Classical-like education now includes 1984, a book that has infiltrated popular culture with phrases and ideas about the awfulness of a huge, all-controlling government, without actually doing much to discourage the growth of such governments. Don’t believe me? Use Google or whatever resource you want and try to develop a comprehensive database of government operated databases. Don’t forget to include notes about laws allowing or even requiring these to exist as well as the sources of information (such as intercepted emails, credit reports and public records such as court filings) that go into them.

Maybe, instead of discouraging those things, 1984 provided the inspiration. It has certainly inspired plenty of books and movies along similar themes. Arguably, the entire sub-genre of dystopian science fiction started with 1984. Personally, I always found that good science fiction taught more about people and society than the majority of the so-called classics I read in school. I preferred Asimov to Hemingway, Heinlein to Homer. (ANYONE to Homer, really, though a couple of the movie adaptations were somewhat enjoyable). Few English teachers sympathized with this view.

Maybe it’s different today. That’s something that would be interesting to hear: Are there more science fiction books infiltrating the things considered classics? Probably Fahrenheit 451. That’s the only one I can think of but I’m a student of computers and security, not literature (though I’ve also had some short stories and poems published – mostly fantasy stories and science fiction poems, believe it or not). In a world where Twitter is the new literature (see below) and cars and TV sets contain computer chips, there may one day soon be practical value as well as intellectual in science fiction classics about a robot uprising, or first contact.

Now if someone could feed 1984, or even some of the more traditional classics, into the 140 character chunks of a Twitter stream, maybe I would get around to reading it sooner.

Random sources of Twitter Literature (some of it surprisingly good, though no classics yet):

• Thaumatrope — I should mention this one has bought 2 of my pieces, one of which appeared on Christmas Eve last year.
  
• VeryShortStory
• Outshine
• nanoism

I ran across an interesting internet hoax yesterday. Apparently, a number of people believed the announcement that Twitter was going to start offering special accounts – for a fee – that would allow both more than the usual 140 character limit on posts and would, apparently, randomly force people to follow these special pay accounts. (For the record, no, I’m not one of the people who fell for it. Really. You believe me don’t you?). See Twitterville Falls For Premium Accounts Hoax for more information.

Poor Twitter. People are making fun of their business model just because they don’t have one!

Let’s just take it as stipulated that Twitter is cool. That’s one of the reasons it gets targeted for silly jokes like that. If you don’t even know what Twitter is, you’re not cool. Sorry. That’s life. Look at The Infection Meme and Twitter to broaden your education. More importantly, it sometimes has value, though not always where you think. And I don’t just mean this: Ohio Cops Use Twitter to Talk to Residents.

One feature of Twitter (apparently not entirely planned by the creators) is the ability to tag posts for subject matter and search on those tags, so that you see what the whole world is saying about a subject, not just the people you personally follow. During the final episode of Battlestar Galactica I posted several items with the tag #BSG, to show that I was talking about BSG. See how it works?

There are services out there that allow you to leverage these tags. One such service, WeFollow, lets people register their user names in conjunction with up to 3 tags and then when other people search WeFollow for those tags, they will see posts from the users who associated themselves with the tags (Maybe it makes more sense if you just go look at the WeFollow website.).

I’m undecided about registering with WeFollow myself. The biggest reason is that it requires you to validate your membership on Twitter by allowing WeFollow “to access and update your data on Twitter” (That’s from the authorization page. Emphasis theirs), and I’m not sure I want to do that. Funny. I let applications access my profile on Facebook frequently – but ask for the same thing in a different context and it seems ominous. Paranoid much?

See WeFollow Twitter directory: Kevin Rose’s latest for more about WeFollow.

Anyway, having found that mildly amusing, I tried something I thought would be more interesting. I searched  Twitter for the tag #haiku. Twitter is well suited for haiku because of the 140 character limit on posts. More accurately, the 140 character limit makes Twitter better suited for haiku than for sonnets, or almost any other kind of poetry (though one of these days I’m planning on doing a series of tweets modeled after the old Burma Shave stuff. This Social Web / Is kind of fun / but I’m bored with Tweet Spam / You’re following is done. Twitter Shave.”)

The search brought up a lot of haiku. I won’t reproduce any of them here. If you’re interested, try it by clicking http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23haiku

For full disclosure, sometimes I post things that will come up in that search. It seems to me that the ephemeral nature of 140 character posts streaming by is well suited to the moment-of-surprise aspect of haiku. Either that, or I have too short an attention span for anything else. My blog posts certainly seem to wander, don’t they?

Or maybe not. After reading several hundred Twitter haiku I learned two things:

1. There are some amazingly good poets putting stuff on Twitter.
2. But the overwhelming majority of them are TERRIBLE.

It was  a surprise to see the high proportion of Twitter haiku that concerned fecal matter (not usually as politely described as that). I’m pretty sure this is not what the great Japanese masters of old intended when they invented the form. That “moment of surprise” was not intended for shock, disgust and even sadness at the empty heads of so many people. Well done haiku can be truly beautiful. It can evoke profound thoughts (not that I know much about those) and make you feel a wide range of emotions.

I’m particularly fond of a modern variant of haiku, scifaiku, which is (basically) haiku with a science fiction (or other genre) twist (see Scifaiku.com for more on this fascinating art form). I’ve written and even published some of it. Scifaiku (and the wider range of science fiction poetry) is some of the most creative work you’ll ever see. I would even be willing to go out on a limb and say that poetry should have more creativity and less excrement.

I subscribed to an RSS feed of Twitter haiku but if the feces-to-poetry ratio doesn’t improve I probably won’t keep it. But it was an interesting experiment.

One of my short stories, a fantasy about a bard who gets in a lot of trouble, is now available for reading in the current issue of  Sorcerous Signals. The story itself is at http://www.sorceroussignals.com/LegendofBats.html and is also included in their first ever print anthology Mystic Signals . You can buy Mystic Signals at https://www.createspace.com/3370204 or from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Mystic-Signals-1-Carol-Hightshoe/dp/1441453474/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232557841&sr=8-18

I sell a lot more poetry than short stories, even though I’ve been writing stories a lot longer, so it’s a big kick for me to actually see a story make it to print. The stories pay a little better too, though I’m not exactly getting rich off of any of them. Incidentally, this story is one of a sort of loose series of them I’ve been writing (and failing to sell), all taking place at around the same time. For some reason, they are all written in the first person, too. Don’t ask me what order they go in. This is the first one to be published, so it must be first! Did I mention it was a loose series?

Anyway, I hope people will read the story, buy the anthology, and leave comments here telling me what they think.

What do you think?

A friend of mine and I have developed something of a tradition of drinking a shot in honor of famous people when they pass on. Not just any famous person will do. It has to be someone we, personally, consider interesting or significant. We did a shot for George Burns and one (or was it 2?) for Ronald Reagan.

On the other hand, we did not have a shot for Heath Ledger, despite his fantastic turn as the Joker because, a) We had not yet seen Dark Knight when he died and b) neither of us was very familiar with his previous work and so had no very strong reaction to his death. I’m not claiming it’s fair. There has to be some kind of system since the idea is just to show a token of esteem for someone, not to get massively drunk. If you want to get drunk, you can come up with much more frequent excuses to drink shots!

Anyway, after some consideration I think it’s unlikely we’ll do a shot for John Updike, despite his status as one of the most highly regarded American writers of all time. Or possibly, because of that status.I don’t remember for sure if I ever read anything by John Updike. I may have been forced to read one of his short stories in an English class at some time but I can’t be sure. I’m reasonably sure I never read any of his novels. There are several reasons for this. Here are some:

1. I don’t read things just because critics or English professors think I should.
2. There isn’t enough time in the world to read everything and I still haven’t even read all of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. (Don’t worry. They’re over there, on the shelf. I’ll get through them eventually)
3. Yes, as the above item implies, I prefer science fiction and sometimes fantasy. Mostly, Updike was not known for those.
4. When English professors (or, worse, critics) say a writer is important or merely very talented, I tend to think it likely that that writer’s work is unreadable and probably devoid of meaning. Years of harsh experience taught me that.
5. The last few years (10?) I read mostly textbooks. I’m working on a master’s degree currently. There’s a lot of reading.

And so on. Notice, however, that not one thing on this list has anything to do with Mr. Updike himself, or his actual writing. I have nothing against the man and am completely willing to believe that the world is diminished by his passing. My sympathies to his family.

Now I have to get back to reading about Malware.