Just before New Years I contemplated joining Facebook, a social media step I never before had been tempted to take. My wife walked me right up to the edge, filling in a username and password for me on the new user page. Her logic: It would be great to be able get the news from friends and family that sometimes was only broadcasted on Facebook. I might even get more readers for my writing. And she wouldn’t have to be the one with the Facebook page.
Contemplating the jump into social media made me wonder how writer are using it. I was curious about Facebook still, but more fascinated by Twitter. Would a tweeting writer mostly post updates about new books, readings and publications, or do some writers use the medium as a way to take notes and share ideas for work? Maybe I could find some micro-novels and pint sized poems in the Twitterverse (Twittersphere? I’m still not sure what to call things these days).
So as I was poking around the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, I was pleased to be introduced to D.A. Powell and Arda Collins, via a piece on poets who tweet posted on the Lit Pub by Tiffany Gibert, a Brooklyn writer and reviewer. She compares the tweeting writer to the metalsmith, whose “work becomes more difficult and more intricate with smaller objects.” She continues:
The writers I love tweet about nonsense. They tweet because it’s amusing. They tweet stories and dreams and observations that succinctly demonstrate why they write, that they must. They tweets shards of wisdom so sharp that I feel the dullness of my own tweets, and I hope that my RTs do not debase their gracefully worded morsels.
As I hadn’t really ventured into Twitter before, it took a minute to adjust my verbal focus to the #hashtags and @replytopreviouspost Twitterese. (Whoever came up with the name Twitter knew something about how words catch hold and recombine!) But like Shakespearean verse - if one can at all compare the two - once I got the feel of the way things are put and the terseness of a 140 character statement, it got easier.
D.A. Powell teaches and writes in San Francisco. On Jan. 8 D.A. Powell tweeted, “'Robin. Where's Robin? In the Riddler's filthy clutches.' – Batman." This followed by, “’You owe your life to dental hygiene.’ – Batman.” And then, “Time to bang a gong.” No explanation or backstory to these but, like the lines of a poem rearranged, cut up and pasted together again, they make for an associative kind of reading.
Arda Collins, who won the 2008 Yale Younger Poets award, has a sharp sense of humor, which seems particularly apt for Twitter. Responding to a post by @jeremygregg: “It must be hard to tweet after all that praise! Is your inner voice whispering: ‘Careful; the Poetry Foundation is watching!’ ?” She responds: “@jeremygregg The @PoetryFound can already see everyone's naked poetic thoughts! They have a special device developed by NASA.”
Reading Twitter posts reminded me sometimes of an assignment my Creative Writing 101 professor Stuart Friebert gave us to listen in to conversations in the cafeteria and take down tender morsels in our notebooks. Sometimes it is just a group of people I don’t know discussing their plans to meet for tacos next Tuesday, but sometimes bits of language that have that mysterious quality of seeming to possess a life of their own jump out of the conversation.
The New York Times also picked up on this (thanks to Gibert?) in a piece in the Sunday Book Review by Anne Trubek. Trubek considers how social media is reshaping the role of the author from someone we shouldn’t and, some would say, can’t ever get to know to someone who we can see eating his breakfast of burnt toast. She writes:
Many authors have little use for the pretension of hermetic distance and never accepted a historically specific idea of what it means to be a writer. With the digital age come new conceptions of authorship. And for both authors and readers, these changes may be unexpectedly salutary.
She interviews authors from Salman Rushdie to Gary Shteyngart to D.A. Powell who say they like the interaction Twitter gives them with readers, sometimes long after the initial publication date of a novel or poem.
As a writer, though, I’m not so interested in what any of my favorite authors are eating or listening to. I learned after high school and college that trying to be just like your favorite writers doesn’t always make you write as well as they did. But the possibilities of language and conversation on Twitter seem useful and perhaps genuinely inspirational.
I have learned of a few more poets to check out who, judging from their tweets, will be worth a read in verse. It’s the possibility of these discoveries and for the emergence of new kinds of communities that I find to be the most exciting development in online writing. Perhaps clicking that ‘submit’ button on Facebook would bring me even more connectedness, but I haven’t brought myself to do it yet.
I’ll leave you with a poem I found through Tiffany Gibert on Twitter: “Look at this, my very favorite poet in the whole world on Twitter @JasonKoo!” His poem "Work" appeared in The Missouri Review Online.
Here are the opening lines:
Everyday Django goes to work at the same time.
Takes breakfast at eight, runs a quick shower-paw over the ears, then
hits the office
By 8:25. And by office I mean
Bed. This is work he excels at, stretching and accepting
Petting when he’s looking particularly cute. I find the word “particularly”
Particularly hard to say, but Anna has no such problems;
Everyday she goes to work putting people into yoga poses, making them
say “particularly”
With their bodies. In yoga, you learn to release yourself
By resisting yourself. What a beautiful idea.
Even more beautiful is how one almost always feels this actually to be
happening while doing it,
Unlike poetry, which is governed by a similar idea
Yet rarely provides this feeling while one is doing it.
Click here to read the rest.
Dan Schneider is a former high school English teacher who lives and writes outside of the Rochester, N.Y., area.
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