Ledbury Text Poetry Competition

The text message has revolutionised the way we arrange to meet, flirt, cajole and bother each other. Other things it has revolutionised include: things we do to pass the time when waiting for a train; opting out of a social occasion without a convincing excuse; and how we spell the word ‘great’ if we are twelve. And now it has revolutionised poetry.[1]

The Ledbury Poetry Festival Text Competition 2008 was an attempt to harness that revolution, if something as wild and unruly as a revolution can be harnessed. Maybe it can be harnessed for its kinetic energy by attaching revolutionaries to a massive dynamo so that their wild gesticulations and fast-moving mouths generate electricity for the entire district. This is the kind of revolution I’m talking about – and it is also good for the environment.

The rules were simple: poems should be written as texts on mobile phones and sent in to the judges. The poems had to be no more than 1 TEXT MESSAGE IN LENGTH (which is 160 characters). In fact, this was the only rule. Nevertheless, several entries were instantly disqualified for being up to ten text messages long; some even incorporating ‘/ ’ signs to indicate line-break.

Others were instantly cut on the usual poetry competition grounds of scansion slavishly applied then hastily abandoned to meet the rhyme scheme; shopworn formulations like ‘forever and a day’; things being improbably etched onto hearts or rattling, equally improbably, through minds. Anyone who’s spent time reading a poetry slush-pile will be pretty familiar with these, as with the difference between metaphor and cliché which, whatever it may be, is not sincerity alone. One thing that struck me is how easily we still use the word ‘soul’ although we’re no closer to working out exactly what we mean by it. Anyway, this purge of the mawkish immediately reduced the list of poems by two thirds.

Out of the remainder there was a surprising (which isn’t to say displeasing) lack of haiku. Only Bashō is allowed to write haiku – and Bashō would have hated mobile phones; he had enough trouble keeping his family off his case when he went on poetry-writing pilgrimages as it was. He’d get back to Iga Province and his brother would be like, ‘You missed my birthday! I’ve been calling you non-stop, and I know there’s signal on the narrow road to the deep north, so don’t try claiming that again.’ And Bashō would try to claim his battery had died or that his phone was just on the blink, but his brother would be all, ‘Is that your birthday present to me, Bashō? Insulting my intelligence?’

Given the brevity imposed by the form, the best entries were the ones that explored a single idea in straightforward terms. A lyrical description of a hippo; a description of a family asleep; a personification of the word ‘ok’.

I had not expected to approve of the poems that employed text message abbreviations and symbols. I’m often mocked by friends and family for using apostrophes and complete sentences in text messages (and also for the way I text physically, using the thumb of my right hand and the index finger of my left hand while I gaze at the phone with undue concentration, all of which, I’m told, makes me look like an ape tickling a kitten). However, I believe that history will exonerate me. For the majority of us who have contract phones as opposed to pay-as-you-go, the old constraint of 12p per message doesn’t apply. In fact, we are given so many free messages per month it encourages verbosity, if anything, so the argument that abbreviations are an economic and technological necessity doesn’t hold so much water. Thus Text Speak isn’t the glorious evolution of the English language many have predicted; it’s just a specific freak-of-language COMMA that will probably be confined to the early 21^st century the way telex was to the 20^th STOP. A surprise last minute victory for the prescriptivist grammarians. Huzzah! 

This being the case, I was shocked to find that the poems making use of the generic conventions of the traditional text message were actually the best of the poems submitted. I xpctd 2b reelee annoyed bi-this, but I suppose it isn’t really so surprising. When Auden appropriates the forms of prayer-books, instruction manuals and public speeches in The Orators (1932), he preserves the surface effects of these non-literary genres to great effect. Otherwise what would be the point in appropriating them? So, in spite of myself, here’s a rule for the next poetry competition you enter: When you’re writing a sonnet, use iambic pentameter, when you’re writing a text poem, use emoticons and @ signs.

The poem I’ve awarded 3^rd place struck me as using a witty and original central idea: personifying the abbreviation ‘O.K.’ as if it were the initials of a person. After much deliberation I’ve awarded 2^nd place to the shortest text poem I received. The image of a Nasturtium “broadcasting” its seeds is subtle, original and worthy (pace my earlier protestations) of a modern-day haiku. But in the end the poem that stuck in my mind was the gallows humour of a beleaguered zoo-keeper feeding himself to his favourite cheetah – which is at once poignant and absurd; so that’s my winner.
Luke Kennard