Tag Archives: poems

Business, Poems

Up the Viral Staircase

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About fifteen years ago I heard how blogging would change the world of journalism and transform the ways we consume information.

Someday every person would write a blog and traditional news gathering would soon give way to a million beautifully written first-person accounts of every important event and critical issue. Paid reporters would become obsolete.

I thought that was silly, and I was certain blogging was something I would never do.

Time made a fool of me on that last point.

But I’m not yet convinced that personal blogs can change the world aside from simply increasing the level of written noise. Although with so many computer users out there offering their precious attention to online articles, the potential seems great.

In a sense this is like playing the lottery – you don’t blog for very long without entertaining the fantasy that something you’ve written will “go viral” and lead to a situation where so many people are following you and reading your work, you can lounge around in your pajamas all day, making a comfortable living by sharing your interesting thoughts with an eager, easily transfixed world.

The power of massive popularity is potent! I started blogging in the Fall of 2008. Almost six years in, I’m still viral-resistant and massive-popularity free.

But the other day I read about a survey that explains what I have to do to score big. The researchers took a look at what it takes for online content to be widely shared, making the person responsible for said content an overnight sensation.

All you have to do is follow the steps upwards to glory, right? A sort of viral staircase. It turns out certain kinds of articles are shared more readily than others.

The problem is this: writing one of those articles sounds like a lot of work. I didn’t start blogging to put in any actual effort.

The survey, from BuzzSumo, is pretty clear about what succeeds. Long, in-depth, well-researched pieces (at least 2,000 words) are preferred by influential people who share lots of “content”. The most widely shared posts inspire feelings of “awe”, “laughter”, and “amusement”, in that order.

And if you don’t already know the difference between laughter and amusement, your cause is hopeless.

There were more viral content triggers listed based on interviews with people who were asked why they shared a particular story online.

The reasons were:

  • To bring valuable and entertaining content to one another
  • To define themselves to others (give people a better sense of who they are)
  • To grow and nourish relationships (stay connected with others)
  • For self-fulfillment (to feel more involved in the world)
  • To get the word out on causes they care about.

And one more thing – most of the top-shared articles were quizzes! This conforms with the theory that people will readily share a thing if they think it provides a window into their own personalities.

All very instructive, and of course I’d love to write a post that will be seen by millions. How am I doing on the checklist? Not so well. At this point I’ve written fewer than five hundred words – not even a fourth of the way to the required 2,000 word point for world-dominating status.

Sigh.

Clearly I will have to find a way to short cut this guaranteed-viral content process.

How? With a stupid poem, of course!

I’ve highlighted all the key words so there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that I’m doing what I can to touch every important base.

Please please please share what you saw –
A blog that filled your heart with awe.
It’s deadly aim on social cues meant
you felt waves of deep amusement.
And when thinking of it, after,
you convulsed in gales of laughter.

Observations, so aligned
your personality defined.
A simple string of words has willed
that you feel fully self-fulfilled.
And if you don’t know what that is,
It’s too late now – this is a quiz.

A post that hits its targets well
and rings each viral content bell
except this heartless length command –
the word count must exceed two grand!
At seven hundred now – No dice!
Unless, of course, you read it thrice.

How good are you at following directions?

Poems, Science

A Polluter’s Lament

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Featured Image taken by Dori (dori@merr.info)

Last week’s White House National Climate Assessment was remarkably blunt about the reality of our situation – that we are already experiencing the effects of an environmental shift.

For some of us in the baby boom generation who have been following this issue for a long time, this comes as a surprising development. Yes, we had heard that our habits of consumption were contributing to a potential catastrophe, but it always felt our role was simple – to create the problem and then to start a conversation about how later generations would face it and solve it.

Sorry about the mess, guys. Good luck!

Now this latest report seems to suggest the we are not going to be able to skip out on the check after all. Any chance I can go back and un-drive all those miles and un-click all those switches that let the power flow?

I didn’t think so. Would a poem of atonement help? I asked Trail Baboon sing-song poet laureate Tyler Schuyler Wyler to write one up, and he agreed because every stanza could include a reference to death – his favorite subject.

The warming fields and rising seas
The melting ice and dying trees
The drying lakes that will not freeze
This all has come up by degrees.

We’d heard it was a thing to dread.
And by our habits it was sped.
But also was it often said,
It won’t get bad ’til we are dead.

But now they say it has arrived!
Not something still to be derived
for our descendants to survive.
It came while we are still alive!

Our sadness, is, of course, profound.
For glacial ice now in the sound
and forest creatures elsewhere bound,
and us, that we remain around.

What have you witnessed that you thought you would never get to see?

Poems

Hair Scare

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For a brief time yesterday the parade of horribles that makes up the world’s news was interrupted by the delightfully wacky story that all North Korean men have been ordered to get the same haircut as the Hermit Kingdom’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

The BBC, which broke the story in the western media, walked it back a few hours later by amending the headline to limit the Hair Dictum to male students, rather than all men.

It remained a nice frolic for feature writers though, because anything involving the suppression of young people is irresistible eyeball candy for the oldsters who follow news headlines all afternoon.

But sourpuss editors who do not want a good time to last too long subjected the story to some journalistic analysis and concluded this entire totalitarian trim tale was probably a hoax, because real North Korean men who have been seen out walking around in broad daylight recently are not sporting Kim Jong-un’s side-buzzed, floppy-topped do.

What a pity. I had already commissioned an ode to Kim Jong-un’s Hair Order from Trail Baboon Poet Laureate Schuyler Tyler Wyler, who is only capable of crafting juvenile sing-song verses.

And once STW begins a project, he cannot stop until he’s done.

I sat down in my barber’s chair
for one more monthly shearing,
For years Bob cut my thinning hair,
a gradually growing clearing.

“I’ll take the usual,” said I,
“the way I always do.”
“The usual?” he said. “But why?”
“The usual’s not you.”

“For I can cut it how you like.
My stylings are the smartest.”
I said “If you can make it spike,
I’ll know you are an artist.”

“A spike,” said he. “I’m on the job.
Your spike will be sublime.”
“If that won’t work,” I told him, “Bob,
the usual’s just fine.”

He spoke at length to every strand,
he clipped and combed and pasted,
Caressed each follicle by hand.
No single hair was wasted.

But as completion quickly neared
Bob’s face slumped in a frown.
The spike that he had engineered
stood briefly, then fell down.

“That’s fine,” I said, “A noble fight.
The challenge was too tough.
It won’t take long to make it right.
The usual’s enough.”

It only took a little while
A peaceful, quiet respite
But when I saw my newest style
I looked just like a despot.

Hair was collected in a clump
Like a racer’s in the luge is.
As if a wild bear took a dump
on Moe of the Three Stooges.

I looked at Bob. His face was cool.
I said, “This is deranged.
I asked you for ‘the usual.'”
“That’s it,” he said. “It’s changed.”

“That spike was never meant to be.
‘Twas preordained to flop.
All hairstyles now, are, by decree,
dictated from the top.”

What’s ‘the usual’ for you?

Poems

Word Jumble

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Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden

Hey Mr. C.,

We’re just about to get out of school for another year and I can’t wait. Whenever May comes around I start to think about much fun summer is going to be and I kind of lose track of things, which is too bad because that’s exactly when we’re taking all those tests.

This year I was really sweating it in English class because Ms. Filbert-Nutt got this idea that we should all memorize the same poem – this thing by Robert Frost about a yellow brick road somewhere in the forest or something. I’m not too good at remembering things, probably because I’m kind of old, for a sophomore.

Anyway, she told us in September we’d have to learn it, and as soon as you felt ready to recite it you just had to tell her and she’d give you two minutes to do it in class. Alicia Bombardo did it the very next day, of course! I kept putting it off, and by the time March came around she started calling on people who hadn’t done it yet. I had to use my fake sore throat voice a couple of times just to get a pass.

So I thought I’d managed to dodge it completely, but then last week when we were doing the essay part of our year-end exam, it turned out she wanted us to write it on the test paper! Longhand!

And it was just my luck I was sitting a little behind and just off to the side of Stephen Craft. He’s kind of smart but he’s also wiggly and he’s got these really thick arms and he kind of hunches over his papers when he writes. So I was only able to get a glimpse of word groups here and there while he was writing it out.

It’s not easy to copy from someone’s paper when they’re all fidgety like that. Especially if the teacher is as fussy about cheating, which Ms. Filbert-Nutt is.

Anyway, I did my best. But when she gave me the paper back I had a “D”, with a whole bunch of question marks scribbled around my answer to that poem question, along with this note: “What happened here? Talk to me!”.

Here’s what my paper said:

Two woods diverged in a yellow road,
And travel I could not sorry both
And long be one, traveler I stood
And as far down one looked as I could
Bent to where it in the undergrowth;

Then just the other, as took as fair
And better having the perhaps claim
Grassy it wanted, and because was wear,
Passing the that as though for there
Worn about them really had the same,

Both equally and morning that lay
Step in no leaves had trodden black
Another first marked I for Oh the day!
Way how on knowing leads yet to way
Ever should I come if I doubted back.

With this telling shall I be a sigh
Ages somewhere and ages hence:
Roads a wood diverged in two and I,
Traveled the one I took less by,
Made the all and has that difference.

So now I have to have this meeting with Ms. F-N and I think my whole grade kind of rests on it. Mr. C., I’m wondering if you could help me think of something good to say that isn’t too false, but isn’t totally honest either. Something with just enough spin that it could keep me from flunking my sophomore year. Again!

Your pal,
Bubby

I told Bubby that I try often enough but I’m not a very good liar – whenever I tell a whopper people see through me right away. All my excuses tend to fall flat so I didn’t think I could help him. He wrote back and accused me of making that answer up, which, of course, was true. But he asked me to pass it along.

What should Bubby say to improve his grade?