Pinsky on Twitter
Robert Pinksy checked in at Big Think to extol the merits of social media sites such as Twitter and their significance on contemporary poetry. From the article:
“Twitter is a stage,” he says--but it’s part of the contemporary political climate. Poets should concern themselves with “what people are talking about” now, which has little to do with how the words are arranged on the page, or whether they are printed or digitized.
In fact, poetry happens to be surprisingly well-suited to the current technology: an entire poem can fit on one screen of a computer. Even e-readers, which lack the ability to display lines of verse, present a challenge that “in some ways that goes back to the Greek and Latin poets: they had lines to be heard, but their poems were written on scrolls or wax tablets without spaces.”
The entire brief article can be found here. At the bottom of the article, Pinsky reads his poem "The City" and then "revises" it into a tweet.