tweets

Do you have a little poetry in you?

robertafsmith4 Comments

Cover of Haiku Poetry Ancient & ModernIt’s National Poetry Day on August 16th and you still have time to enter a little poem in our competition.

You could flirt with the 17 syllables of haiku, free range like e. e. cummings or dash off a sonnet.

Something short in other words.

Not that I’m suggesting that writing a short poem is easy, not if my blogging experience is anything to go by. A long time ago, we bloggers were challenged to write blogs of under 100 words on Canterbury. I produced four Pineapple Lumps blogs. They were the most difficult blogs I have ever written.

But here’s a thought: maybe tweets are the new haiku. With a limit of 140 characters and inspiring examples in Twitter Wit, could this be a new way to acknowledge Poetry Day 2013?

Philippa Gregory to Tweet next novel

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The White Queen
The White Queen

There have been a few Twitter literary connections, here’s another starting today to tempt readers. As reported by The Bookseller, Philippa Gregory will be Tweeting her new novel The White Queen (copies of which will be winging into your local library soon).

The character of Elizabeth Woodville, Queen consort of Edward IV, King of England and mother of the famed Princes in the tower, will be telling the story. The tweets can be viewed at http://www.twitter.com/ElizWoodville with “Woodville” will be tweeting between 5pm and 8pm from 11th August and 17th August (U.S. time).

It sounds like a clever way to tempt readers into a story, feed them tasty morsels of a story – and an interesting experiment for writers. Gregory said:

Tweets are a discipline, rather like a haiku, and the shortness of the sentence gives each one a rhythm which is really interesting for prose … And some of the tweets seem to me to be more arresting than the prose of the book. I especially like the first one: ‘If my mother were not a witch, and the descendant of the goddess Melusina, I think none of this could ever have happened to me. But it did’.