[Varun is typing]

Varun: Hey how have you been? You know
just last week I had been thinking of you
Varun: Listen hey I'd been meaning to tell you
something for a while but
Varun: Hey I saw you near PVR Saket the other day
and I was going to
Varun: Hi Uday, have you seen Margarita, with a Straw,
Would you want to go this week?
Varun: I don't know how to say this but I'm just going to,
Varun: Hiiiii
Varun: Hi

[Uday is typing]

Uday: Hiiii I'd just been thinking about you, where
have you been
Uday: Hellooooo you, long time!
Uday: Varun!!!
Uday: Hiiii, you know I saw you near PVR Saket
the other day and was going to say hi but
Uday: You know you have a long life, I was just
Uday: Hi

'Darkroom' by Erica Goss, with an interview about poetry and technology

In
the spirit world

backlit
by old stars



dreams
sound like

water
falling



we
are inside

and
outside

at
the same time



trays
clack like old bones

as
faces rise from wet paper



their
deep cloudy eyes

and
conquered mouths

appear
between our hands



lips
and chins a blurry landscape

touched
with the faint light

of
a slow exposure



switch
off the red

and
exhale

we
stand on

In the 1.4 MB floppy disk

I used to gift you two or three photographs,
(.jpeg's were smaller than .bmp's),
of us standing on the Gomti embankment,
or of you at the Chota Imambara
next to the portrait of the fat Asaf-ud-Daula,
or of our school Principal (after doing
vulgar things to him on MS Paint).

Then, along with those,
I gave you songs - one .mp3
(could be Bombay, 'Humma Humma'
or Dil To Pagal Hai, 'Chak Dhoom Dhoom'
or that 'Dance of Envy' where Shiamak Davar
was thinking what-was-he-thinking, and
Karishma Kapoor was dancing wtf-is-that-dance.)

Then, to fit them in, I gave you two more songs
but these were .rm, not even half an MB,
where even Lata didi sounded real,
like someone's grazed her throat
with sandpaper and
fed her pickles
for a month.

Then, after these (because
1.4 MB never felt small, then, stowing
all I wanted to give) I added three .ttf's,
font files, as special gifts, one of which even
had a middle-finger-symbol, which you then used
in almost every subject-line that year
1999.

Annoyance

Just when we thought some
of the old annoyances
of the 20th century
had died out, they come
roaring back
new,
improved,
upgraded,
and intensified like the government

dug up their corpses
and stuffed them with hydraulics
and, like, RAM sticks
and shit, and turned
them into deadly cybernetic warriors.
They didn't die.
They were waiting.
They were adapting.
They. Were. Evolving.

They've returned,
fortified by modern technology,
designed to annoy us anywhere,
everywhere,
and at the convenience of
the person who wants to annoy us.



From 4 Obnoxious Behaviors The Modern World Made Worse by Luis Prada, Cracked, 11 December 2014. Submitted by Kenn Merchant.

Tweeting Iambic Pentameter

Another piece of technology is mixing with poetry.

That hesitation right before a kiss
I don't remember ever learning this
I've never had a valentine before
I'm not a little baby anymore

If that is poetry, it's technological "found poetry."  Those rhyming couplets written in iambic pentameter come from Twitter and were found by an algorithm. Yes, those ten-syllable lines of alternating emphasis that we learned about in school when we studied Shakespeare, sonnets and blank verse have been pulled from tweets by a program called Pentametron.

Pentametron (@pentametron on twitter, which you can follow without joining twitter itself)  is set up to monitor public tweets, pull out those in iambic pentameter, look for pairs that rhyme, and then retweet them as a couplet.

The site's motto is:
"With algorithms subtle and discrete
I seek iambic writings to retweet."

Is it poetry? That's your call. But it is interesting that these random couplings sometimes produce logical groupings.

I haven't got the mindset anymore
the tiny inner voice becomes a Roar!
Another boy without a sharper knife.
Closed eye and hoping for a better life

This isn't the first poetry via Twitter site that I have written about. Earlier there was the "Longest Poem in the World" which is still running.

In an NPR interview, the creator of Pentamentron, Ranjit Bhatnagar, said that he had been "... inspired by the exquisite corpse games of the surrealists" and realized that Twitter could supply "an endless waterfall of tweets."

Some make sense -

I wanna be a news reporter, yo
I never listen to the radio

I pay attention to details okay.
Its gonna be a busy day today :(


and others are... well, not so clearly connected

She's like a rainbow, painted black and white.
Not going to the ball tomorrow night.

Of course, a lot of people who don't regularly read poetry might say that "real" poems often don't make sense to them, so...

Pentrametron generates 15 to 20 couplets of 140-characters or less on an average day.