“Twitterature”

In Alena Smith’s view, “a great Twitter writer is one who, like a parkourist in an urban space, plays with and quite possibly subverts the limits or expectations imposed by authorities.”  She highlights some writers worth following:

There is the tragicomic clowning of @RealCarrotFacts, by Late Night With Jimmy Fallon writer John Wyatt Haskell. There is the broken poetry of the “Weird Twitter” crew, notably including non-Internet-based poet Patricia Lockwood. There is the brilliant social satire of the hydra-headed Kaplan accounts, which mostly skewer [Jonathan] Franzen’s own New York publishing world, and their bitchy, hilarious Hollywood counterpart, Jarrad Paul (@JarradPaul). There is the visually fascinating, concrete-poetry-esque glitch art of accounts like @Glitchr_, @Newmoticons, and @l_i_i_l. There are established literary novelists who have effectively used Twitter for political provocations, such as in Teju Cole’s recent series of wryly incongruous tweets about bombing the U.K. And there are the peculiar pleasures to be found when the work of old-world writers is wittily transplanted to the 21st century Twitterscape, as in the case of Samuel Pepys (@samuelpepys: “Went to bed without prayers, my house being every where foul above stairs”) or Emily Dickinson, whose tight-knit, unnerving wordings are remarkably Twitter-ready and have spawned any number of homage accounts.

Meanwhile, An Xiao considers the revival of traditional Japanese poetry on Twitter:

[T]raditional Japanese poetic forms like haiku (17 syllables) and tanka (31 syllables) are ideally suited for Twitter’s brevity. Additionally, these poems were intended as creative dialogues, making the social aspect of Twitter relevant as well. In can be easy to read Twitter’s rapid fire nature as contra the meditative quality of poetry, but that feature couldn’t be more relevant.