Daily Threads
Wyn Cooper

Backstreet barricade, arcane
balustrade, hidden kingdom of wing and prayer,
details too fine to miss or mess with,
skinny escape from a netherhood
of parapets and puddle soaked oaks.

Hospital palatial, shadows under foot and bed.
Time glacial. Fear the sound in both ears.
Tubes, lube, sudden exclamation,
declaration of unrepentance, remnants
of dinner untouched, rouged, hushed.

Scat tracks, crosswalk, bebop
haircut; moonshine, daylight,
pills not popped: no threats
to these daily threads I weave and weave.

The commercial has a Twitter addict gleefully thumbing his message "I am sitting on the porch", and it seemed to me , momentarily, we might entering a time of New Brevity, with language being composed less of phrases that build their way to more complex meanings and more by lexical equivalents of shrugs, sighs, head gestures, rolled eyes. The limits on the number of characters you could use for the tweet you had in mind forced you to boil your idea down to a point to where even essence is seared away and only the proverbial grunts of need remain. It would , it seem, be a potential source of making one's recognizable language do interesting things, the irony being that one begins with a coherent series of things to say but who , made to observe limits they cannot modify, are made to reduce their communications into something akin to tea leaf readings. Read between the lines, fill in the blanks, assume the Tweeter hadn't made a thumb-inclined typo and in fact meant something significant with an odd string of visual glottal clicks. Someone came up the idea here, where an endless stream of Tweets are amassed, stanza style, in what reads like Modernist poetry feeding on it's own armour plated tail. There was a rule applied to the other wise random nature of the project: each line, from different tweets, had to rhyme. A sample from today

digg this
stuck downstairs... at least i have computer, TV, food, and potty!!!
Mind pelicans and dropped cell phones when driving your Bugatti...
gay fags put it on twilight and changed the whole song in the process.
This class is becoming more and more pointless as the weeks progress.
I'm about to go to the gym with my sister and brother..
Got lunch on my top so had to nip out and buy another.
praising God for my life and the life of others
Robin Williams and Bono look like brothers.
I have a twin, and she's bad at everything.
Just ate breakfast.. and i cant taste anything!!
Tim McCarver is making my ears bleed and my brain hurt
You might say I'm such a flirt, lipstick on my neck and shirt.
you're such a mystery, i just want to stand and stare.
i can't wait to go home today and smell some new air.
Just woke up and I'm still thinking of you. Fuck my life.
Now where did I put my hockey mask and butcher knife?
Im so tired. I'll take the walk and clear my head and Star Wars was fun
Awesome. I'll budget and rearrange my room and I may get one.
is pumped to see what Jesus has in store for my life and my band.
Good morning everyone! Got a day of fun and craziness planned!

This is in The American Grain, the lingua franca William Carlos Williams had so much faith in, the metronome-smashing , multiheaded parlance. Endless lines of concern, emphasis, interest and obsession coming at us through the air, joining up with other odd phrases and fresh banalities that give a everyone who wants one a voice to spend their two cents as they please, the only limit being a 140 characters at a time. Our collective concious, it seems, seems to be somethig that is now ruled by an impatient twelve year old with a remote control.

The Wyn Cooper poem, as it insists on being called, is Twitterdism incarnate, and it's most striking accomplishment is that it's taken brevity beyond the conservative deployment of articles, adjectives and other connecting tissues that made Hemingway the still-pilloried genius and made the style a crabby, grandstanding assemblage of barking alliteration and crash-dummy conceits. Some of this might have been effective had it suggested another medium, a painting in the style of Stuart Davis. In his canvases, a city scape on a typical walk does seem to pile on you, which makes his best work a nicely clustered terrain of icons to walk through. But Davis hasn't the curse of feeling required to be literary. Cooper boils the sentences down to the grunts, but what remains isn't believable as speech

Backstreet barricade, arcane
balustrade, hidden kingdom of wing and prayer,
details too fine to miss or mess with,
skinny escape from a netherhood
of parapets and puddle soaked oaks.

He might have veered closer to the old WC Williams' notion of writing to the rhythm and bluntness of speech as it's actually spoken, without a bookish filter to bring the impressions through. Sonnet like? Maybe, but the best sonnets get to an effect that makes you consider the technique and limitations after the emotional content registers and becomes felt by the reader. I can't get beyond this poem sounding like someone attempting a unique way of expressing itself. That is exactly the problem--it does sound unique, and it's the kind of singularity you hope remains a single instance.