Tuesday 28 September 2010

i am poet, hear me whimper

hello there. you might have seen me around. i am one of those people on the internet who writes everything in lower case. you might have encountered me on blogs, facebook, in ezines.

let me explain something to you. lower case is an artistic decision. m’kay? microsoft word capitalises automatically after each new sentence. well screw them, telling me when to punctuate! i refuse to indulge in this capital-ist society. together with my poet buddies, i will smash the system with my quietly incompetent grammar, and rein in the new dawn, whatever that means!

you might have heard of ee cummings. there are legions of writers who think this anti-capital-ist poet the most experimental and radical and boundary-breaking poet of his generation. well, he is. we are his children. we have no need for your big butch capitals. here is an example of my poetry:

i am the burn
on the hexagon
the small squirrel
in the cloak of now

burrow blood blue through
filtered
lens
like tom

or jane

or you

please buy my chapbook
colors without you at lulu now thank you goodbye.

7 comments:

  1. i don't like capitals either, especially london and kuala lumpur.

    did you notice that burn, in some typefaces, looks like bum? now, a bum on a hexagon would be a really good image.

    i also like omiting line breaks and punctuation here's one of my poems:

    a lumpy koala in kuala lumpur lumped all koalas and kualas together partly cos he couldnt spell and also cos he really only meant terengganu and lumpur cos he had a terrible time
    in both resulting in rather large lumps and so he hated them

    i think yours is the better poem actually :)

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  2. he he he, that poem is wonderful mr mike! would you like to become chairman of the lowercase poets society? we are based in BELFAST. oops! sorry! didnt mean those caps! they just pop out sometimes. its like a devil inside me.

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  3. Everything looks so much smarter in lowercase. So I am obviously humbled and speechless in light of your genius (and commitment to detail -- must you go back and un-cap all your Word-automated caps???).

    As you can see, I can't stop myself from capping and thus reveal that I have no linguistic cred whatsoever.

    B

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  4. THAT IS CUTE AND ALL BUT YOU HAVEN'T LIVED UNTIL YOU'VE SPENT A DAY WITHOUT TAKING OFF CAPS LOCK!

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  5. barbara, that is ok one day you will convert to the ways of the beautifully small and you will make your millions with all us self-publishing lulu geniuses

    cruella, i must not be tempted to the dark side, no... put the caps AWAY! no, i did it again!

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  6. As a PROPONENT of alternately CAPITALIZING i have to support wonky and INDISCRIMNATE USE of case.

    *giggles* Nicely presented Mark. I wanna see the bum on the hexagon. Or any bum really...

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  7. YOU HAVE CONVINCED ME, TART! TO HELL WITH THIS MOUSY LOWERCASE PANTS! I WANT TO SING, DAMMIT! SING!!!

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