A poet in a serious discussion yesterday used the example of 140 characters as a constraint-based poetics. He was talking about haiku, natch
The tweet in itself was precisely 140 characters. Here in blogger, though, it seems so bare, so minimal. In the twitter format I use (the application called "Tweetie") the full 140-character update fills the space and makes me feel downright loquacious. These new media really are our messages. You'd think I'd have discovered this before now.
By the way, the poet mentioned in the tweet above was Tom Devaney. At the Writers House, I hosted eleven eleventh graders who are currently in a one-trimester poetry class. We had a 2.5-hour session. I decided to bring in six Philadelphia poets--of all sorts--to present to them each in 20 minutes a single short poem. The chosen poem was to be a way for the students to learn about the poet making the presentation.
Tom cheated a bit--bringing in not one poem but three. First, two translations of the Basho favorite (the old pond, frog jumps in, kerplunk) and then John Ashbery's haiku from A Wave.
It worked. After discussing the Basho, they were ready to take on Ashbery and spoke remarkably well and freely about the Ashberyian line as if it were as explicatable as a haiku. Generic familiarity. I don't know how accidentally Tom fell into this pedagogical move, but it worked. Below is a portion of Ashbery's "Haiku." The line that encouraged the best discussion, a favorite of the students:
"And it is a dream sailing in a dark, unprotected cove."
It is the most haiku-like (static and imagistic yet open and resisting sense) and yet just the sort of line that causes Ashbery's readers (outside the haiku context) to scratch their heads. Nice going, Tom!
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A few weeks later: we've now created a PennSound page with links to audio and video of each 20-minute session.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
