Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter

My main piece of good news is that I got wait listed for the upcoming MacDowell Colony Winter/Spring residency period. Wait listing may not seem like that big of a deal, but it’s better than striking out completely, which is what happened to my previous two applications. I also received my beautiful contributor’s copies of 32 Poems, in which I am honored to appear alongside no fewer than three of my Sewanee buddies! Oh and I had a surprisingly political poem accepted by The Lyric. (more…)

As I have previously written, I was encouraged by my appearance on the Marketing 2.0 Panel at Push to Publish to give Twitter another try. I duly buffed up my profile, snagged a few good people to follow, downloaded Tweetdeck and dedicated 15-20 minutes a day to posting useful links. I observed (roughly) Don Lafferty’s 12:1 ratio, which suggests that you should tweet 12 things of general interest for every time you tweet something really only about marketing yourself. So I tweeted NJ poetry events that were nothing to do with me, links to contests I happened to receive emails about, links to interesting poetry stuff on the blogosphere, and even links to the odd “famous” poem that swam across my brain. And every now and then I tweeted about my own new blog post, or calls for submissions to one of the many (!) poetry journals with which I am involved. I labeled everything with the hashtag #poetry, and felt like a good Marketing 2.0 citizen.

Unfortunately I am coming to the conclusion that Twitter is not ready for #poetry in any serious interpretation of the word. If you search #poetry then most of what you get is bad haiku–it clearly has not been lost on the twittosphere that you can usually fit a haiku into 140 characters. Not many people, it seems, are tweeting poetry like good Marketing 2.0 citizens. (The exception would be the chat #poettues arranged by @robertleebrewer, but that only really happens on Tuesdays, as the name would suggest.)

I see Twitter being incredibly useful to my fellow panelists @donlafferty and @centsiblelife, and I want to make it work for #poetry as well, so, come on, any ideas?