Slice of Life: Very Small Twitter Poems

Slice of Life 2011Yesterday morning, I read an article from The New York Times about efforts by writers to use the Twitter format to write very short poems. I am always intrigued by how technology informs our writing, and how our writing can be adapted to technology. So, throughout the day, I tried my hand at some Twitter poems, and used the #poetweet hashtag to share my writing with others.

It’s challenging, as you can imagine. The constraints of 140 characters leaves very little room for exploration. You need to be short and you need to choose your words carefully. It’s a great exercise in editing, actually, and I wonder if some variation might not work well in the classroom.

Here are some of the poems as screenshots off Twitter, which I recast into podcasts this morning, too.
Peace (in the poems),
Kevin

3 Comments
  1. What a great idea! We’re going to try this too. I like the picture you paint of the very strong moonlight and all the different shades of meaning that can come from your last line “how do I slow-fade the light.” Hmm…I wonder if we could combine this form with Haiku?

  2. I read your post just before having my poetry group & shared some of the ‘tweets’ with them. They always like a new idea to try. What a challenge, to be able to hone the words into just the meaning you wish. I liked the consonance of the words ‘sea scallop . . . sees”, & the meaningful words about the scallop, hiding within its shell.

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