Last week we were lucky to have Louis Antwi join us as part of the WPP micro-fellowship intern programme. He kindly wrote a piece on his love of words and poetry. Enjoy!
I love words.
Written down. Spoken aloud. Imagined.
They don’t have to be long words. They don’t have to be fancy words. They don’t even have to be in the right order.
You can use a handful of them to tell a complete story. Ernest Hemingway once said that one of his greatest pieces of work consisted of just 6 of the beautiful little things; “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
But I’m worried for the future. Where do words fit into the life of today’s human? Will they be bullied into working in the hazardous industries of business reports and shopping lists or worse, in Tweets telling the world of the success of said shopping lists?! Will the spoken word cease to exist forever, replaced by a series of iGestures, the physical hieroglyphics of the modern world?
Probably not. But how we interact using words is most certainly changing. Thankfully there are still pioneers, heroes amongst digital men who are two steps ahead of the game and are bringing the rest of us along with them.
These are just a few of the brilliant projects I have come across recently.
Such Tweet Sorrow: Actors play out the classic Shakespearean tale of star crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet over five weeks through the medium of Twitter. 140 words of love in its deadliest form and Montague-Capulet hatred. Twitter put to better use than the usual shouting about cats.
Poetry Mosaic: London based poet, Naomi Woodis, cuts and pastes together extracts of reactions to her stimulant questions to create a completely new poem. The results are astonishing.
Six Word Stories: And so we return to Hemingway. Since 2008 sixwordstories.net has published user submitted ultra-short stories inspired by the great man’s original. Sixwordstories can also be found on Twitter. Famous writers have also jumped on the bandwagon. Here’s a few of the best.
Simon Armitage’s slightly humorous (although probably not to John) offering: “Megan’s baby: John’s surname, Jim’s eyes.”
Hari Kunzru’s ominous “Stop me before I kill again.”
And of course the inspired; “Man steals some watches. Gets time.” from the sixwordstories.net contributor Bogusky.
Now you know you won’t be able to stop. Answers on a postcard.
Fantastic! Glad to see Louis was a good match for Digit. I sort of figured he might be :)