The Twitter Poet

140 characters — Twitter has become the mega-platform for this term. One poet has taken advantage of this and decided to take it a step further by tweeting poetry.

Leif Baradoy is an Operations Manager for a non-profit organization that helps people end extreme poverty by changing the way they give gifts during the holidays based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Baradoy decided to tweet poetry on April 1 of last year — however it was no April Fools joke. Leif has been tweeting a poem atleast once a day since then.

“I thought it would be an interesting new media experiement.  I wanted to offer people little shots of art to influence their perceptions throughout the day–give people the opportunity to be surprised by a phrase or image that cuased some emotional reaction in them.”

I thought to find someone out there who tweets poetry after sitting in class itching for my pen and pad. I thought, “I wonder if there is a poet who tweets poetry.” I found that there are SEVERAL poets that do just as Baradoy does. He says that he follows several twitter poets. Just to name a few:  @momku, @perpetualpoem, @irenekaoru, @TwitterBard.

There is method to the madness. Because of Twitter’s nature, 140 characters is the limit. So, Baradoy and poets alike are constrained to say a few bars. Baradoy says that he usually tweets lines from longer poems. Which means that often he does not tweet specifically for Twitter.

“I’m not overly concerned about gaining followers or having my work retweeted.  A more strategic poetic might work to incorporate breaking news into a poem.”

While twitter is not Baradoy’s number 1 influence, he believes that each poetry tweet should be able to stand on it’s own, even if it is from a larger work.

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