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Motivation Monday: Comment-Box Poets
Online comments are often profane, crude, idiotic, or downright jibberish.
If you go to YouTube and view a humorous video, or visit your favorite blog, or literally go to any popular website that has comments enabled, you are bound to find scores of public comments that make you wonder where humans went wrong.
The expected nature of awful online comments makes it even more surprising to discover that over at NYtimes.com there are a few commentators who are becoming well known for their poetic use of the comment box.
Darryl Campbell explores these comment poets in ”The Comment–Box Poets of The New York Times.” Darryl writes:
The website of The New York Times has become the unlikely home of a community of poets ‒ specifically, poets who comment on articles and blog posts in the form of light verse…
These poet–commenters, in other words, are doing the poetic equivalent of mugging for the camera. For some…the draw is simply being able to show off for an audience. For others, like Mooney, the Times offers a proving ground, a place for him to perform literary feats of skill and daring and to thereby cement his self-identification as a writer of light verse.
When you take something as trivial (in the 21st century, anyway) as a comment box, something that has been used for slander, violent rants, and illegible banter, then transform it in such a simple way – by using it to express your opinion through poetic writing – you are reaching deep avenues of creativity.
What’s something you could use differently? How can you use different tools – online or off – to express yourself?
