Since I have spent a while discussing the nasty side of Twitter and its submission to illiberal speech laws, I thought I would introduce a bit of balance by pasting a recent Storify I created for English PEN.
Although this is not to do with Twitter as a platform, Twitter poetry as a literary form does exist, and not necessarily in English.
There is a radio programme called ‘Y Talwrn’, which runs on BBC Radio Cymru, and is a weekly poetry competition between two teams (you can read some background on it in an article I wrote for the Transdiffusion broadcasting history site a few years ago: http://www.transdiffusion.org/radio/bbc/broadcasting_th ).
Under a new Chairman-cum-adjudicator this year, one of the new rounds introduced has been the ‘Trydargerdd’ or ‘Twitterverse’, in which the competitors have to compose a poem on a stated topic using no more than 140 characters.
The results have been a bit hit-and-miss (probably because it’s a new idea which the poets haven’t necessaryily quite got their heads around yet) but it shows that the idea of ‘compressed poetry’ can work.
Robert,
Although this is not to do with Twitter as a platform, Twitter poetry as a literary form does exist, and not necessarily in English.
There is a radio programme called ‘Y Talwrn’, which runs on BBC Radio Cymru, and is a weekly poetry competition between two teams (you can read some background on it in an article I wrote for the Transdiffusion broadcasting history site a few years ago: http://www.transdiffusion.org/radio/bbc/broadcasting_th ).
Under a new Chairman-cum-adjudicator this year, one of the new rounds introduced has been the ‘Trydargerdd’ or ‘Twitterverse’, in which the competitors have to compose a poem on a stated topic using no more than 140 characters.
The results have been a bit hit-and-miss (probably because it’s a new idea which the poets haven’t necessaryily quite got their heads around yet) but it shows that the idea of ‘compressed poetry’ can work.
Nigel Stapley
(a.k.a. ‘TheJudge’ on LibCon)