I now have a Twitter account: @oliverdixon11. Expect regular updates on what brand of granola I'm having for breakfast, daily consternation ("!!") at irksome delays on the Northern Line and of course puckish asides on current affairs, Game of Thrones and The Apprentice. Oh yeah and maybe something about poetry...
It's interesting that worthwhile poets like George Szirtes seem to be trying to actually use the tweet-form for snippets of text that are - if not exactly poetry - at least writerly. However, while the innate brevity of the format might perhaps lend itself to the concision of potentially good writing, if you spiel out your tweets as rapidly as George does the effect is somewhat lost. Call me curmudgeonly but I can't help holding to Pound's "Use no superfluous word" as the cornerstone for writing in whatever genre or context one is tackling: increasingly difficult to maintain within the public discourse of social networking where to be frank 90% of the words posted are superfluous.
Reminds me of the opening sentence of an article I wrote a few years ago:
One of the paradoxes of contemporary society is that while
on the one hand we are privileged with access to an unparalleled abundance of
communicative channels - many now feel
adrift and spurned if not granted a daily inundation of texts, emails, tweets
and ‘Facebookings’ – on the other hand the general content of our communicative
exchanges has never seemed more impoverished, more bereft of both meaning and style.
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