Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr, Oh My! Confessional Poetrying in Our Digital Age
Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr, Oh My! Confessional Poetrying in Our Digital Age
John Fry
This exercise taps into the ever-proliferating presence of social media’s purchase on our lives by asking students to write a poem modeled on, in imitation of, or departing from C.D. Wright’s poem “Personals.” The borders between truths and lies are precisely where so many poems live, and this poem speaks to that as directly as any. The stakes of this betweenness often become clear quickly when students discuss the risks of participating in social media platforms like those in the exercise’s title. When we wink at someone, write a message after viewing their profile, swipe right instead of left, or create profiles of our own on sites like Tinder, we stand somewhere between fact and fiction. Even if no one in the class has ever been “catfished” (when someone misleads another about their appearance online), for example, usually someone knows another who has been. Students never fail to have opinions about how platforms like Instagram have altered how people present themselves to the wider world.
This assignment asks students to take risks at the level of the poem’s shape and content. This could entail a truthfulness radical in the vulnerability it lays bare or, of course, an equally radical act of fabrication. Or a combination of these two. More than once students have commented that the act of replacing Wright’s language with their own inspired poems that eventually departed from Wright’s and became, line by line, their own. The goals of this assignment are to create a draft of what could, with revision, be called a poem; to play with language without fear of seeming silly or foolish; to be silly and/or foolish, which is to say, to be willing to write badly in the hope of writing well; to let language lead; and to have fun.
Step-by-Step Instructions
- Give students Wright’s “Personals,” and give them time to read it.
- Ask students to write their own versions of Wright’s poem.
- Ask them to consider how this process is an exercise at the intersection of self-portraiture and persona.
- Encourage students to keep this in mind while they compose their own poems and, just as importantly, to take risks at the levels of the poem’s shape and content.
- Tell students that the goals of this assignment are to
- Draft what could, with revision, be called a poem
- Play with language without fear of seeming silly or foolish
- Be silly and/or foolish
- Let language lead
- Have fun!
- Provide a skeleton version of Wright’s poem with blank spaces in the place of crucial nouns and verbs (a Mad Libs version) for students to fill in if they choose. This will lessen the pressure of beginning the writing process for students who feel intimidated by writing a poem in response to another’s or writing a poem at all.
- Stress that they are free to fill in the blanks with their own words while maintaining Wright’s syntactical structures or, alternatively, to depart from Wright’s language