The Short Version
Who Am I?
I am a poet living in Madison, Wisconsin. My first two books of poetry are coming out from Graywolf Press and University of Wisconsin Press in 2010.
What’s the Point?
This has been a helpful exercise for me, personally—it ensures that I write at least a little bit of poetry every day. My dream is to get a community of interconnected writers twittering tiny poems every day, creatively cross-pollinating one another. If you’re reading this, maybe you’re a poet who would like to join in. If so, read on.
Rationale
Posts on Twitter are limited to 140 characters, which makes for a nice formal restriction. Also, the small size makes the once-daily requirement less intimidating. And if and when the community of poet-twitterers grows larger, it makes the reading load manageable. But can you really write a whole poem in 140 characters? Agha Shahid Ali said that a ghazal couplet should be “thematically and emotionally complete in itself” and that it “may be quoted by itself (anytime, anywhere) without in any way violating a context—there is no context, as such.” I find this notion of a small, self-contained unit of poetry (not quite a poem, but capable of standing alone) very appealing. And I would like to point out that a ghazal couplet can certainly be written in 140 characters or less. So twitter-length poems, micropoems, whatever you want to call them, whether they are truly poems or not, can stand alone.
Formal Conventions (Not That You Have to Follow Them)
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•I do not abbreviate or use “leetspeak” (LOL, etc.) for the sake of saving space, but maybe there’s an interesting poem in that for someone.
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•I do not omit spaces to squeeze in a few more letters (i.e., Idon’twritepoemslikethis).
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•I use the slash (/) to indicate a line break, double slash (//) for stanza breaks. I omit spaces on either side of the slash.
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•I do not title the pieces. This is what, for me, really sets these pieces apart from true poems. I’m a firm believer in the importance/necessity of titles. But there you have it.
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•I give myself imaginary bonus points if the poem is exactly 140 characters long.
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•I do not deliberately write a single poem in daily installments (stanza 1 today; tomorrow, stanza 2; etc.). This, to me, feels like cheating on the length restriction. I say that I do not deliberately do this because often I find that individual twitter poems do fit together. I often feel like I'm writing the same two or three poems again and again, and I, like anyone, have my personal obsessions/fascinations.
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•I do not quote 140-character snippets of poems written by others. I only post my own work. I’m pretty set on this point.
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•I do not use the tweets to make announcements about poetry-related events, etc. That’s what I have a blog for. Poems only. I have set up a Facebook group (Poets on Twitter), where members can post poetry news, announcements about recent book publications, upcoming readings, etc. Not a lot of activity there yet (*sigh*), but such is life.
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•I write the poems the day I post them (i.e., I don’t write several over the weekend, then post them one at a time during the week), and ideally I don’t start composing them until I actually sit down to post them. I try not to put much advance planning into them.
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•I post my poems mostly from the web, but I also sometimes use my cell phone to text the poems to Twitter (find out how to do this here).
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•I use my real name for my Twitter user name. I strongly encourage you to do the same. But if you’re some fiction writer by day, poet by night, I understand.
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•I post only poems on my Twitter account. If I used Twitter for its original social networking purpose, I would set up a separate account for twittering poems.
Logistics
If you want to participate, you don't have to join any official group. This is fairly decentralized, which I like. But it does raise a concern for how someone getting started would know who is out there twittering poems. There are groups for poets on Twibes.com, but as far as I can tell, very few of the tweets in these groups are actual poems--that is, they seem to be merely twitter groups that happen to be composed of poets. I have established the Facebook group Poets on Twitter, which you can join to have your Twitter username listed publicly. That way, when new poets come along, they can see who’s posting poems already. So far, several people have joined this group but haven’t partaken of the actual poem twittering. But nontheless, it’s there.
If you’ve never been on Twitter before, I should note that you get to choose who you will follow. If there are X number of poets twittering out there, but you only want to follow 3 of them, that’s OK. Also, in theory, you can control who follows you--that is, you can set your account so that you have to approve/confirm anyone who wants to follow your posts. I personally discourage this. Besides the fact that it seems a little exclusionary, there’s the following rule of thumb: if you don’t want something to be public, you shouldn't put it on the Internet to begin with. But I have no authority to enforce this besides saying that I disapprove of it. That said, I’ve certainly collected my share of spam “followers.” Some free Twitter clients, like Tweetdeck, allow you to sort the people you're following into separate lists, which can be handy if you're following a lot of people. Though now Twitter has it’s own list function.
Comments and Questions
If you have comments or questions, please contact me. I’m still looking for something to call these things that is catchier than “micropoems,” and any suggestions are appreciated. Also, if you have any recommendations or ideas for how to expand/push the limits of this form/idea, I’d love to hear them. What about collaborative poems? Great. What about using the tweet to post a link to a video of you reading a poem? (Great, but I think the actual poem should still be only 140 characters long.) What else? You tell me.
