Ashes Poetry

On www.ashespoetry.net you’ll see an photo of the Adelaide Scoreboard, adapted to take tweets from http://twitter.com/ashespoetry to both indicate how the test’s going and also poetic ideas, notes towards drafting a poem for the day. All done in real time, a bit like leaning over the poet’s shoulder while they’re at their craft.

The idea was James Grimster’s of www.orangeleaf.com who designed www.ashespoetry.net I’d never tweeted before, and a joy of tweeting, perhaps the only joy is you have to say what you want to say inside 140 characters including spaces – less to read and to write, win-win.

Stephen Downes, secretary of the Sports Journalists Association, www.sportsjournalists.co.uk suggested this could be a new poetic form. It is. The Delivery.

The ideal  delivery is 140 characters and twenty-two words long. Cricket  buffs will see the connection since a wicket is twenty-yards long too. In other words, the delivery’s poetic metre is in yards, which is fun.

To continue the cricket analogy, if there are less than twenty-two words, it’s short of a length, and more means it’s over-pitched.

The choice of twenty-two words over 140 characters is quite deliberate. It means the average character length of a word is between six and seven. In turn the syllablic length of each word is unlikely to be more than three. Mono, bi and tri-syllabic words make for a strong rhythmic potential.  For example:-

Batsmen swish bats, sight-screens move. Cricket’s longitude is trickier to mark and compass: it lies deep beyond the horizon, inside a ball.

This is necessary since there are no line-breaks. Poetic sense is derived from assonance, alliteration and rhythm, exactly like Anglo-Saxon poetry (Beowulf and similar sagas were originally written without line-breaks.)

The Delivery, if you like, is an Anglo-Saxon or phonetic  equivalent, however rough, of  a haiku, since it deals entirely with sounds, whereas haiku are based on ideographic or pictographic verbal representation.

As such it may be deployed far beyond its original sphere, cricket.