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A Twitter Poetry Experiment

Sarah Hesketh
February 14, 2012

One evening during the recent snow falls in London, I decided to take the opportunity for a bit of shameless self-promotion and tweet out, verse by verse, one of the poems from my collection Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf. I’d never tweeted any of my poetry before and I was curious to see whether a band-waggoning hashtag might actually lead to a few more followers, and whether a poem could really stand up to being broken apart, and fed to the crowd in pieces.

The poem I chose, ‘Chaconne for Ice’, was written after the Robert Francis poem ‘Fire Chaconne’. The Francis poem layers different images of burning and heat over twenty couplets. Its inspiration is the musical form the chaconne, a popular baroque method of composition which, as far as I understand it, was used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a short, repetitive bass line.

My own poem seemed ideally suited for tweeting. Its self-contained stanzas all fit snugly into 140 characters and, in theory, each set of lines should stand up in isolation, capable of engaging interest without the superstructure of the whole poem to support them. We’re always being told how poetry is the ideal genre for an attention span-strapped generation, and Twitter would appear to be the perfect vehicle for exploring the fragment form.

But as I started tweeting the lines out, it soon became apparent what a devastating editing tool I’d discovered. Fed out at roughly two minute intervals, the focus on the individual lines was suddenly immense. Without the rest of the physical page and poem for the eye to travel down, the amount of real time afforded to each set of lines really exposed the flaws in the poem. Those lines that I’d always thought the strongest did indeed look ok, but the weaker lines, left to fend for themselves, now looked simple and uninteresting, banal even, in the way they adopted an authoritative voice whilst seeming to say very little. The very fact that they were self-contained was now working against them, because they didn’t point to anything greater than themselves. Even the stronger lines seemed a little self-absorbed and ponderous. It’s not an effect that I’ve ever felt when reading single line quotes tweeted from larger poems, and I wonder if it’s actually impossible to artificially create a true fragment. Maybe they always have to be torn from something genuinely more substantial to properly weight individual lines with meaning.

The response from the twittersphere to my experiment was muted. A couple of people said nice things. I got bored 2 stanzas from the end and realised it didn’t matter if I stopped early because there was no sense of the overall structure of the poem – I wouldn’t be depriving any readers of a satisfying arc. Interestingly, one friend instantly set about a series of brilliant parodies which made me realise that most of Twitter is really just endless variations on a theme. Perhaps there might be an argument to be made that every hashtag game is actually a chaconne-like exercise in form? #meta

Sarah Hesketh tweets as @slhesketh

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