Terri found
this lovely snippet in the Gulf News and passed it on. The annual text poetry competition was initiated by British mobile phone operator T-Mobile, and this year asked for romantic poems written in in txt speech of less than 160 letters.
Text messaging is not only the province of the young, it seems, and this year the second prize was scooped by "a love-struck pensioner"!:
Eileen Bridge, 68, a grandmother, from Accrington, Lancashire, won £350 in the "txt laureate" competition, after she took second place with an ode to her husband of six months. The entry read: "O hart tht sorz, My luv adorz, He mAks me liv, He mAks me giv, Myslf 2 him, As my luv porz." The retired teacher was only beaten by London law student Ben Ziman-Bright, 23, who scooped the top prize of £1,000. He wrote: "Not even the wet rustle of rain can dampen today. Your text buoys me above oil-rainbow puddles like a paper boat, so that even soaked to the skin, I am grinning."
A T-Mobile survey carried out in the UK discovered that:
40% of us cherish mobile love messages by keeping them on their handset, and nearly half of us (46%) crave flirty SMSs and poems. Under 24s are the most sentimental - 49% keep more than 20 romantic texts on their phone, while only 16% of people over 45 years keep that many. Women (40%) and under 24s (62%) find it easiest to communicate feelings via text rather than face-to-face, while one in five men (19%) find poetry the most romantic form of communication.
So why not send your loved one a romantic txt message in poetry today ... and so we can all enjoy it, post it here!
Bernice sent me an e-mail telling me that one of her ex-creative writing students from CENFAD, Mag Tan Yee Mei (who, as Maggie Tan, wrote a story Theatre des Marionettes which appeared in Silverfish New Writing 5) has won a UK writing competition for a romantic micro story submitted by SMS.