“The poem is a form of texting … it’s the original text,” says Carol Ann Duffy. “It’s a perfecting of a feeling in language – it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We’ve got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It’s a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form.”
“The poem is the literary form of the 21st century,” she says. “It’s able to connect young people in a deep way to language … it’s language as play.” Just, one might say, as text messaging is language at play.