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.
Trying to write poetry about the internet is probably a mistake, but I'd be intrested to know what you lot think oF this attempt. And any ideas for a title?
Shouting in the ether
You are only what you make
What you type
is what you are
pictures from the screen-words
reality ignored
reality ignored
the screen-word’s pictures
are what you are
Defining you
made by what you make
Echoes through the ether.
Interesting thought. But do you think we ignore reality or just shape it to our own benefit?(Not that I'm arguing with your poem.)
