If you regularly read our PR blog, or the online postings of any other public relations agency, you’ll be well aware of the possibilities opened up by social media. However, using such online networks for literary experimentation is hardly ever referenced.
Which is a shame, as there have been some truly inspired efforts to make our status updates ring with the language of true wordsmiths. The I Am poem is one such idea, though in this case those whose words form part of the prose are (largely) oblivious to their role in the creative process.
Pär Thörn is the programmer responsible for creating a poem based on the use of the words ‘I am’ in tweets from around the world. A code scours 140 character posts for the specific phrase, and then lists sentences containing it, in real time, onto a web page- thus forming a verse that’s at once abstract, but rather representative of society’s own thoughts. See what you think for yourself by following this link to The Poet’s I Am website, after you’ve had a look at the stansas we were treated to below.
