Friday 14 November 2008

One Minute Wonder

I came across this fascinating blog yesterday.

It's called One Minute Writer. The aim is that each day a new topic is posted onto the blog. Contributors have 60 seconds to respond, thus keeping replies short and sweet. There's even a link to a You Tube 60 second countdown clock.

Anyway, as it happened, yesterday's topic was technology. I thought it would be interesting to try to compress my ideas, and get them written down in under a minute. What came out was a Haiku-esque poem.

I like the idea of enforced brevity, as someone prone to wanting to play with language and use more words than necessary, when given the opportunity.

One Minute Writer is a great concept, that challenges and embraces the data saturated world we inhabit. I recommend trying it out, or at the very least, having a browse through some of the entries.

Here was mine about technology:

Mobile phone, 
Tactile to touch, 
Brings Web to Palm, 
Fingers caress
While mind wanders.


 

4 comments:

Don said...

Hey, saw your post on the One-Minute blog and liked it: nice twist on Bad Habits. I had to wander over and see what kind of cleverness lurked behind that post. Nice job.

Sacha van Straten said...

Hi Don,

Thanks for the kind words. Well, my background is many years spent in radio and TV, making a variety of shows. I career changed in 2002 and became a high school teacher.

In my spare time I take photographs, mainly landscapes. I do have a Flickr site, which I haven't updated in a while and really needs some fresh material. http://www.flickr.com/photos/svanstraten/

I used to do a lot of performance poetry but haven't touched it in a long time. When I came across the One Minute Writer blog a few days ago the only things that came into my mind were short poems. It seems to work and I think I'll try to keep it up. I've also posted entries for Vintage (pick of the day!), Three Goals and the Technology post that's repeated on here.

I'm tempted to start my own 60 second poetry blog and see how far I get with it.

Thanks again for dropping by.

Sacha

Laura Jayne said...

One Minute Writer has become a lovely habit rather quickly for me. And a wonderful way to find blogs like yours.

C. Beth said...

What a great "review"--thanks, Sacha!

I'm quite wordy too (funny since my Word Verification for this comment is "worte" which could be pronounced "wordy")--so maybe one of these days I'll do enough of the one-minute writings to help me be more concise.

We'll see!