I'm happy with them.
Because I was sitting in class just thinking about the word
sting--
a stinging sensation, police sting, bee sting, Sting as a name, sting as a noun, sting as an action. And then I was mulling something for a poem and veered away into
string.
Stringy texture. String of pearls. String of phrases. Cheese string. Collecting string. Stringing you along. Picking up string (our novelist friend's phrase for when you're researching for a new story without a wholly clear understanding of how exactly you're going to use it.)
I couldn't let it go.
I wrote another today. In, er, class, again. While listening to the lecture-- it's like doodling. Interestingly I can do this half-attention for the sociology class but for the lit-crit class I need to pay full attention to the lecture or I drift off altogether.... probably because the sociology class goes so goddamn slowly, because it's full of
fucking
idiots. ... But that is neither here nor there.
WHAT'S LEFT WHEN
Spoken as if you had the nerve for something, woke up &
Moved to the window first to shut it. Slipping frward
Under doorsteps. Step me a shrine, a wail, a wait.
Digging in earth. I'll steal yr babies; I'm trees & shock of air; the
Gleaming leaves & exposed roots. My bottle's full when yrs is
Empty. I'm sliding backwards. My name is mud.
This may be a generational thing, but what is the literary difference between "your" and "yr"? Also, frward vs. forward. I'm assuming that a poet of your talent did it on purpose. Which vowels, which words get chosen and why? I think I'm hopelessly old school, non-traditional spellings jar me completely out of a work.
It's not something I do all the time-- I tend to use it in the more, er, avant-garde of the poems. When I'm looking for a voice that's slightly more ansty-feeling, a little fast at the mouth, a little eliding or sliding away its vowels. I'm quite fond of the insta-effect it has on the tone of a poem. It's *supposed* to be jarring. I'm picking it up from a fairly-recent postmodern/hip-hop tradition in poetry (Ntozake Shange would have been the first poet, I think, that I read to have done it) but you can see it in a lot of nineteenth-century/pre-modern casual, everyday writing. Even the baroque elegance of the ampersand has been co-opted into this shorthand. Which I find pretty amusing.
As to which letters I cut out-- it really rests on which ones I can get away with dropping and still have my reader understand what I mean. In that last SMUDGE acrostic, I actually spent a few moments with the find-and-replace making all the "the"s "th"s, or the "to"s "t"s, but it didn't really work. Fairly well-established ones are wld, cld, &c, &, yr, yrs. Sometimes I really *want* to abbreviate something like "you" or "are", but I *really* don't want to head into the child-on-the-internet course of, you know, "u r to b 4 me 4ever"-- that's no longer kicky and interesting, it's ugly and kiddish.
It's a fairly personal thing, obviously.
"u r to b 4 me 4ever"
I blame Prince and text messaging.
There was an article in the NY Times a few weeks ago about high school teachers getting annoyed when students turned in essays with those kinds of abbreviations. The students interviewed all said that they were so used to using them online and in notes to each other that they didn't notice when they put them into formal writing.
Oh, good, if that style has the stigma of being juvenile, the real world should hopefully be safe from it. I so enjoy finding grammar/spelling errors in mass mailings and TV commercials.
I can see the avant garde-ness of it. The fogey in me has its hackles raised by it slightly, though. Which may be part of your intended effect, of course. The avant garde has always had as one of its tenets the ruffling of the old guard's (garde's? [sorry, now I'm being pedantic]) feathers.
Oh that reminds me, the Guardian is having another text message poetry competition -- poems of 160 characters or less: see here but also here too. Fascinating stuff.
It actually resonates more to me of age. Letters from the 1700s, or something.
