Friday 8 April 2011

In the 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, the eponymous hero – a brilliant poet with an extremely large nose – improvises romantic poetry to help his friend seduce the woman they both love. With an entrepreneurial panache arguably untypical of poets, Australian Poetry have taken this idea to a whole new level. The Australian Poetry website is putting out a call to poets with the gift of writing memorably wedding vows. The idea behind Wow Vows is to replace off-the-shelf vows – “for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health”, et cetera – with bespoke wedding vows crafted by an expert. The plan, says the website, “is to develop a register of poets, who live in various locations in Australia, come from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, speak languages other than English, in order to market the service ‘Wow Vows’ to those who may want it.”

“I think it’s very important for novelists to maintain a bit of uncommunicative space, a bit of private space where you’re not constantly connected.” So opines Ian McEwan in an interview with the Daily Beast to promote his latest novel, Solar. McEwan goes on to confess his wariness of technology – he doesn’t tweet, he isn’t on Facebook, he only emails and he’s only sent three text messages in his life, and that’s with predictive text turned off. He doesn’t have an iPad although he likes his Sony ereader. He often has his mobile phone switched off: “The idea of being rung at any moment again seems to me against the necessity of white noise of thinking that is not going to be interrupted at any given moment.”

On a similar theme, local writer Megan Blandford has blogged about her need to switch off. She concludes, “I think I might schedule an offline day each week.”

What do you think: do you need downtime from the online world to write well? Or do you thrive on the stimulation of Twitter and Facebook?