Poems are a Form of Texting

Carol Ann Duffy, for the Guardian, thinks all this texting that kids do is a good thing. It'll make them poets.

From the piece...

Hardly a week goes by without a warning about how educationally detrimental it is for children to spend hours of every day screen-gazing and message-sending. But now there's a note of dissent – from the poet laureate, no less, who says she believes texting is an ideal springboard to good poetry-writing.

"The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text," says Carol Ann Duffy. "It's a perfecting of a feeling in language – it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form."

Duffy, who became Britain's first female poet laureate in 2009, is passionate about the teaching of poetry in school. She believes there's a myth that poetry is considered "difficult" or "complicated" by teachers – but says that's simply not borne out by what's really going on in the nation's classrooms, where poetry is enjoying a major revival. "The poem is the literary form of the 21st century," she says. "It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language ... it's language as play." Just, one might say, as text messaging is language at play.