StevieslawCulturalUpdate: Times Twitter

In last Sunday’s NY Times, Week in Review section, Randy Kennedy wrote of Tweet Lit.  He spoke of “Twitterature,” a  book of 80 works of Western literature boiled down into Twitter messages, Science Fiction and Mystery work that uses the format, and an apparently successful Twitter Haiku movement—termed Twaiku.  The WIR went on to ask four poets, including two former poet laureates—Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky—to write poems within Twitter’s text limit of 140 characters, title and author not included.  They also provided a site to share your own verse on, hash tag #poetweet.  Here are the Collins and Pinsky poems along with one of mine:

Twitter Poem

The poem creates a space

It hides in a tent in the forest.

Making its own bed it falls asleep in the dark,

wakes up under a lamp or the sun.

Low Pay Piecework

The fifth-grade teacher and her followers-

Five classes, twenty-eight in each, all hers:

One-hundred-and-forty different characters.

Space saver

Today, wind barely

stirs the balding trees, 

the sun’s a sallow

yellow, like the yolk of

a chicken-free egg, and

I have no room to daydream.

I really liked Teeny tiny poem by Elizabeth Alexander

Teeny tiny poem/just enuf 2hold/1

xlient big word/Impluvium/open-eyed

courtyard/collecting rain/as all poems do/

skylife, open/birds do:/tweet.

Give it a try.