This week, as part of my part-time day job with Scottish Book Trust, I wrote a blog about writing poetry on Twitter, or Twitter Poetry; it will be part of a series of ‘Doing Digital’ blogs looking at using social platforms as a place to create and share creative writing.

You can read the blog in its entirety here: Doing Digital: Writing Poetry on Twitter.

In the blog, I introduce two ideas: that constraints are a centerpiece of poetry, and have been, in some form or another, since its beginning – where even the mnemonic devices were forms of structural constraints. The second topic I touch on is using hashtags to include your Twitter poetry into the stream so that you are able to reach further than your followers.

I briefly mention Marianne Moore, who I want to look at more closely here in relation to how such highly structured poems works well for Twitter; after all, Marianne Moore is so hot right now.

I wrote a chapter of my PhD in Creative Writing on her work and how Runaway Rhythm (a form of rhythm that forces the reader to rush onwards, past line breaks, punctuation, etc. almost beyond their control, sometimes leaving them feeling out of breath) can be found even in her highly structured free verse format. Moore wrote in syllabics; in syllable-counted lines that formed very specific patterns.

If we look at “The Steeplejack”, there’s something we can take from this and move into Twitter to try out. The first is the syllabic count that gives the poem its backbone and underlying structure. The poem is eight stanzas of 6 lines (which I won’t reproduce in full here), except for the fourth stanza, which has a truncated last line.

The poem has a stable syllabic formula of 11, 10, 14, 8, 8, 3, where the lines with evenly numbered syllables “tend to be iambic” (Fuller 229). This can be seen in the first stanza below:

Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish
(220 characters)

I could go on for pages about the intricate details of how each word is chosen as a current for the rhythmic effect, but instead, lets look at how something like this can be really useful for Twitter. We all know that Twitter has a 140 character limit. But how can we use a rigid structure of syllabics (or similar, a sonnet even) within Twitter’s restraints? In the blog for SBT I turn a line from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves into a Twitter poem, that’s pretty simple as I don’t really have to adhere to any poetical structure beyond my own mind. But, using a poetical structure within a platform’s limits can be both fruitful and challenging.

Looking again at the first stanza of “The Steeplejack”, it helps to consider how the line breaks are necessary to maintain the syllabic count of the lines. We get to 145 characters at the end of line 3. If this was your poem do you A. abandon the syllabic count and make it work? B. cut off the entire line and leave room for hashtags?

If you choose to go with A. you need to consider the balance of the lines. Can you remove a syllable from the third line of every stanza in order to make it fit? Or do you, perhaps, choose a word that has less characters but the same number of syllables? There is no right or wrong answer, but if you are not putting a complete work within a single tweet, then keep in mind the way it will appear when it comes through the stream of your followers. Which leads on to hashtagging, which I won’t go into here.

If, on the other hand, you choose to cut off the entire line in preference for more room to get hashtagging to add your poem to the larger conversation of Twitter Poetry (#micropoetry #syllabicpoetry #Twitterpoetry, etc) how will that effect the final presentation of the poem as a Tweet and as a whole work? Is the answer to only choose to write very short poems on Twitter? There is no right or wrong answer, the point of using a structure within a structure is to get poets and writers alike to think about the substance of the lines and how each one interacts with another in the larger Twitterverse.

There is a rich amount of information on Twitter Haikus with competitions, hashtags and more, but once we move away from the popular forms of syllabic poetry there is less knowledge and use of it. To fit poetry within more than one structural constraint forces you to look at each letter, syllable, punctuation mark. There are few things that make me sigh more than shit poetry (new or old), and I think that anything that really makes poets think about everything they are putting on the page, on Facebook, in a Tweet, etc, is no bad thing.