The Facebook Sonnet

“Sonnet, without Salmon” by Sherman Alexie (2011)

This is a radical revisioning of the sonnet form. The poem has 14 lines, each of them numbered. Some of the lines are short; others consist of more than one sentence. The poem resembles prose rather than poetry. The speaker suggests that the building of dams on Indian reservations to create the electricity supply has led to the loss of salmon in the river. There are also many power outages. This comment leads to a segue to the topic of computers, and the last section, number 14, is a little story in itself. Like “The Facebook Sonnet,” it offers an amusing take on the absurdities of internet communication. The speaker is in a café in Seattle and watches a couple at the next table who are talking into their cell phones rather than to each other. One goes to the counter to get the other a coffee, and when he returns, his partner says she was texting him to get sugar and cream.

“Text“ by Carol Ann Duffy (2005)

As the title suggests, this poem is about communicating via text messages. The speaker, who has her mobile phone in her hand, and her partner communicate frequently by text, but she is aware of the limitations of texting and regrets that nothing she texts will ever be heard; there is something lacking in the way they exchange their “significant words.