Today's youths will spend most of their lives using their phones as their primary means of communication. Txting will likely continue to be a popular medium, yet many fear this will cause a decline in this generation's literary consciousness.
Perhaps we just need to adapt the forms to fit the medium. As an exercise, I have attempted what I think are perhaps the first examples of poetry in iambic txtameter. This new form uses iambs (or metrical feet having the pattern da DA, as in "request" and "corrupt") and is constrained by the 160-character limit of common text messages. How one organizes the 160 characters depends on the number of iambs in each line, but it would seem to make sense that each line should have the same number of characters (just to make it challenging). Here are a couple of examples:
With 5 iambs (40 characters) per line:
Forego the mission and behold the truth!
You cannot hide inside a church of youth
There is but one objective we can claim:
To coexist, with neither fear nor blame.
With 3 iambs (20 characters) per line:
oh wht a dreary day!
teh sky is very gray
ono! it strts 2 rain
and i get wet again!
this sux i am so mad
i really hate my dad
he took away my fone
and now i feel alone
No, they're not good poems, but maybe the format will catch on. After all, if all some budding poet has on him is his phone when the muse strikes, this may be the most he can do with it.
p.s. Yes, I suppose you could go with trochaic txtameter as well...knock yourself out. :-)
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