[Janice D. Soderling]

Where were we, back before the whole world changed?
The person jabbering in the street alone
xxxxWas certainly deranged,
xxxxNow he’s just on the phone

This from post #1 reminds me of something Aldous Huxley wrote about his first visit to America. Can't remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect that he initially thought all Americans were in the habit of talking to themselves, but he found out they were only chewing gum.

[Gregory Dowling]

Originally Posted by Tim Love

Note also that the UK has Informationist Poetry

This would seem to be the most relevant answer to the questions I put in my first post. The Wikipedia article is very short, however, and I have to say that Googling hasn't thrown up much more information on this movement. I had certainly never heard of it in relation to Don Paterson or Kathleen Jamie. It seems to me that the term has not really taken off - and maybe the same is true of the movement itself.

However, having said that, I did some Googling on the apparent founder of the movement, Richard Price, and came across this webpage , which contains a very touching poem of his. It's not an "informationist" poem, but it does suggest he's a poet worth knowing. I wonder if anyone knows anything about him? Or about Informationist Poetry?

[Andrew Frisardi]

I like that Richard Price poem a lot, Gregory. I'm not getting the connection between that and the Informationist "manifesto" (if that's what it is). I was also surprised to see Kathleen Jamie in that list since I associate her with poetry full of imagery from nature and the outdoors.

[Tim Love]

I know little about Informationist Poetry, but Paterson and especially Jamie must be peripheral to it. I saw Richard Price in the "Identity Parade" anthology and marked him down as one to keep my eyes on. His poems in that book looked more like I'd expect "Informationist Poetry" to be - lots of Information presented using juxtaposition.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Gregory, in answer to your original question in this thread, "Where are the poems of Facebook," etc., another one I just remembered is by our own Maryann C., a fine poem called "MySpace Invader," that's in her chapbook Dissonance. I really like the closing lines, which themselves are a comment on this subject:

What strangeness will engulf our lives when they
smile out of every pixel, wild and golden?
I need to know what world I will be old in.

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks, Andrew! If we hadn't disabled it, I'd feel a terrible temptation to use the Facebook-like "Like" function included in this board's software

The Iron Horse Literary Review was recently collecting submissions for a Facebook poems issue. I'll check when it will appear.

It dawns on me that I've used cell phones in at least two poems. Nemo Hill's "Um Portugues," which appeared in 14 by 14, focuses on a phone message machine.

Shortly after 9/11 there was a lot of prose about the last phone messages left by the dead. Does anyone recall pertinent poems?

[Gregory Dowling]

Yes, the answering-machine does seem to lend itself to poetry. Didn't Tim Murphy write one about Helen Hecht, who could never bring herself to change the message on her machine after Anthony Hecht had died? Or am I inventing that?

Thanks, Andrew, for posting those lovely last few lines of Maryann's poem. Could we see the rest?

[Andrew Frisardi]

Originally Posted by Gregory Dowling

Thanks, Andrew, for posting those lovely last few lines of Maryann's poem. Could we see the rest?

Sure!

MySpace Invader

Not stalking. It's research. I have to learn
this uncouth tongue, this wOOt and LssT and pwn.
I need to understand. Who are these people
who've friended you? who turn the ether purple
with their rank gossip and their splatball anger?
who youtube every crook of a middle finger?
who post and link and tag and thread the world
so knotted every truth I know goes snarled?

Small wonder if I lurk. A blogger's ruse
or facebook feint tomorrow might disclose
new-ravelled rules, enweb new mystery.
What strangeness will engulf our lives when they
smile out of every pixel, wild and golden?
I need to know what world I will be old in.

--Maryann Corbett

[Gregory Dowling]

Thanks, Andrew - and, of course, Maryann. That's a perfect example of what I was looking for in this thread.

By the way, Maryann, I see that with the strategy of slant-rhymes you've cleverly avoided the issue of how the word "pwn" is pronounced.

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks for posting the poem, Andrew. The "leetspeak" (officially, "l33tspeak") issues might be worth talking about, Gregory, and also the fleeting popularity of social networking sites.

When the poem was in proofs at Comstock Review (early 2008?) the editor wrote me a note saying that his middle-school-age son had approved of seeing l33tspeak in a poem. The strangely spelled slang is not much seen now, at least not by me. I don't know if that's only because the young people I know have passed beyond that, or because its popularity has shifted or waned.

And when I wrote the poem, it was titled "LJ Stalker," LJ being short for LiveJournal. But commenters steered me to "MySpace Invader" both because it was clearer and because MySpace was the up-and-coming site. It's long since been superseded by FaceBook.

So here I am, wondering whether I should take this dated three-year-old poem out of the book manuscript that has been making the rounds