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Published on September 3, 2007

This year's SeaWrite Award winner inadvertently illustrated both that point and the generation gap at a press conference last Wednesday when

Dr Trisilapa Boonkhachorn asked him to recite some stuff from his collection "Loke Nai Duang Ta Kapajao" ("The World in My Eyes").

Montri kept the reporters in thrall for a couple of poems, but then he flipped the page to "Monrak Tarok" ("Infant's Love"), which contains a lot of the words that Kids These Days use as part of their subversive ab-baew lifestyle, and the 39-year-old came unstuck.

It was such an effort getting the bizarre modern slang out that he was breathing heavily after a stanza or two. "Okay," he said, struggling to pull himself together, and the room broke up with laughter.

To give you an idea of what Kids Write, here's an example of his teen-style poem: "Ngu ngi na en-du na du cam, show view perd cam plaem plaem si."

Er…please don't ask Soopsip to translate. All we can say is it has something to do with a webcam, an integral tool of MSN chat used by teens.

He soldiered on a bit longer, but this language was just too foreign to him - even though he'd written it himself. "Can I just stop reading?" he pleaded.

Everybody understood and gave him a supportive round of applause for having voluntarily submerged himself in the deviant youth subculture. Someday those kids are going to be running this country and we'll have an even harder time understanding what the politicians are talking about.