iMedia: Ted Rives: A story of mixed emoticons

Today in class we watched Ted Rives perform his poem about mocking birds.

This sparked me to find another poem performance of his. The one I found, I thought, was quite relatable and funny as well. 

     The poem is very different from other poems that we've read in class this week and last. In order to truly understand this poem, one must watch the little slideshow that goes along with it. I think that this brings a whole new perspective to what we as high schoolers perceive poetry to be. We recognize poetry, in general to be very boring, confusing, and a lot of the time, unrelatable. The way Ted Rives presents this poem makes it a lot more interesting and easier to comprehend. Being an extremely visual thinker myself, having the ability to see the poem really helps make it easier to swallow.

     Another thing that makes this poem extremely different is the fact that all of the visual aids/pictures are emoticons. Emoticons have become increasingly popular with the emergence of the countless emoticons released with the iPhone. He uses the emoticons almost in a mocking way with his poem. At the beginning, he shows the mass of symbols which look like gibberish, but when he tells the story along with it, it somehow grows to make complete sense. You can't help but laugh when reading this poem. It becomes more and more almost sarcastic when you look at it. They way he almost pokes fun at the overuse of emoticons without actually cracking jokes is right up my alley.

     I think that this poem or whatever you would call it is important, not just in general, but important to the high school age group. I think this because like I said, it shows a completely different side of poetry, one that is not usually seen. I also think that this is important to society because it's starting the transition  of poetry from lovely dovey sonnets by Shakespeare and love notes from Emily Dickinson, to the critical and almost satirical literature of todays time.

I really want to find some more of Ted Rives' Poetry. From the two that i've now seen, I'm intrigued  I really like the way he wites. The way he recites his poems has a very obvious rhythm. The rhythm of the poems gives it almost a musical ring the the poem. I think I like this type of poetry, but i'm not quite sure yet. I don't think I've read quite enough poetry to form that opinion yet.

~jordan