A contemporary poet I know once said she never quite understood why the Internet generation of readers rarely consumed poetry. Poetry, she argued, is everything that’s distinctive of our times, for it speaks to you instantly, is read in minutes and distils an immediate slice of life. That sounds uncannily like what we do on Facebook. In our virtual celebrations of everyday beauty, our sepia-filtered photographs of yesterday’s sunset, and our status updates of mundane living, there really is poetry, granted we choose to see it. If there’s one form of poetry though, that’s truly born from, and representative of, our age, it is micropoetry.
In true post-modern fashion, the very definition of micropoetry itself is contested. Originally meant for poems under 160 characters (the size of an SMS), which is where micropoetry first trended, with Twitter, it is now accepted at 140 characters. From micropoetry websites, to blogs, and Twitter handles, the Internet is awash with this sea of insta-poets. Of course, micropoetry comes from no literary vacuum. Its most recent ancestors are the imagist poets, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who chiselled language into breath-sized poems that shone in brilliance. They took their craft from the Japanese wordsmiths further back in time, Issa, Shiki and Basho, practitioners of the 17-syllabled haiku and five-lined tanka.
The Internet, though, has spun its own modern take on this poetic heritage; for instance, the ‘tweetku’ or the ‘twihaiku’, is a Twitter haiku. And while the meter and rhyme rules of formal micropoetry seem to free, rather than bind, many micropoets, the default style is free verse ranging from entire poems in single sentences, to one-worded lines in succession. For the most part, the Internet’s micropoets are a host of unknown names, with a few established poets such as T.S. Eliot prize-winner George Szirtes, reinventing themselves to this new form. With social media’s characteristic transience, contemporary micropoetry is a constantly evolving form that lacks a canon, the downside being that much pretentious profundity passes off for poetry. The language used has often absorbed prevalent slang and lingo, as seen in poet Elizabeth Alexander’s piece, “Teeny tiny poem/just enuf 2hold/1 xllent big word/ Impluvium /open-eyed courtyrd/collectng rain/as all poems do/skylife, open/birds do:/tweet.” And now, micropoetry has also morphed to include accompanying photographs, vines and sketch art even.
Outside the Internet, micropoetry is slipping into the growing practice of text as art. While numerous artistes engage with this now, I first encountered it when Shilpa Gupta, in a collaboration with Lucky Ali, anagrammed ‘Nowhere’, to ‘Now Here’ in electric tubelights, on a giant hoarding in Mumbai. At the first edition of the Kochi Muziris Biennale, artist Robert Montgomery, in striking neon lights wrote over an aging British warehouse by the backwaters, “The strange new music of the crying songs of the people we left behind mixing as your boat touches stone here and my new bones touch yours.” In this form that coalesces art, poetry, sculpture and installation, physical history gives the micropoetry context. It’s the kind of verse that we need more of, that which causes us physical pause within the headlong rush of modern life.
