"Texting" [by David Lehman]

Does the triumph of the text message
over the phone call or voice mail
imply that they were wrong all along,
those analysts of the text
who said that the spoken word
is invariably “valorized”
to the detriment of the written word
in the most primal of binary oppositions
that the myrmidons of critical theory
were determined to dismantle
by “valorizing” the bottom half
of any ratio, be it day-night, white-black,
male-female, dominant-submissive,
the haves versus the have nots,
parents and children who dress alike,
and even truth-falsehood, fact-fiction,
cause and effect, as if each pair
were in perpetual conflict,
the universal dialectic having seen to that?

Comments

[Grace Cavalieri]

I'm just glad you didn't text that poem and ruin everything.

[Terence Winch]

Yes, it does. But I think the phone call will make a comeback. "Myrmidon" reminds me of the Irish word "amadán," meaning a fool or simpleton.