Wednesday, October 27, 2010

You are Invited to Our Election Day Twitter Poetry Experiment

Please join us during the 2010 Election in a ground-breaking theatre, politics and Twitter experiment called "112 Poems."

We're exploring the role of the arts as a way to capture political experience via social media, and we want to invite you to Tweet us your thoughts and feelings, hopes, fears, reflections and surprises during this high stakes election. The experiment is being run by Dr. Kerric Harvey in George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs.

What we're doing is curating a collection of people’s experiences, observations, dreams and desires written during the period around Election Day 2010, which we're calling “Twitter poetry.”

The point of this project is simply to start using Twitter as a way of exploring political experience via the arts. Who knows what we'll find?

We're not sure what we're going to do with the poems yet -- but we're thinking of turning them into a book, a piece of academic research, a live performance – or all or none of the above depending on what we get and what we learn.

But even if you don’t want to contribute poetry we could really use your help.
In terms of the "poems" themselves -- there's no need to worry about making them rhyme if you don't want to, and don’t worry about whether it’s a “good enough” poem or “fancy enough” writing. If it’s true to your own experience, then that’s what we want.

In fact, these are more “quick peek observations” than they are conventional poems – slivers of your life and how it feels to YOU during this watershed election. The tweets can be funny, angry, quirky, wry, confused, sad, excited, baffled, despairing, hopeful, and everything in between.
They don't have to look like conventional poems. They can use all the 113 words available in our tweets (to leave space for the RT request) or consist of just a word or two, and you can send as many pweets as you like.

Here's how it works:  Anything you write in the time period around the election will go into our twitter poetry folio. We’ll ReTweet a bunch of these back to you, and together we’ll pick 15 - 25 of them to make into a short performance piece with both Real World and online presentations.

To participate, follow @112poems and submit your poems as a reply to @112poems or with the hastag #112poems. Please no obscenity, hate speech or ranting.

Here’s where you come in even if you don’t want to send us anything as a Twitter poem.

I’m new to twitter – which is key to my research – and so I not only don’t have time to cultivate followers, so I need you to spread the word about this project to your followers.

All I need you to do is follow me at @112poems and to retweet some of my tweets about the project. You can also read and tweet a link to the full blog post about the project which is at bit.ly/112poems

I’m asking folks who write for the experience to use the hashtag #112poems

We're looking for tweet poems (pweets) from all across the political spectrum, so don't be shy!

2 comments:

  1. I am super excited about this project. Half of what I read on Twitter these days IS poetry. I can only imagine how much better it would be if it were intentional.

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  2. Great experiment!

    I've been writing Twitter poetry for a while now. I call myself the Calvin Trillin of Twitter. All my direct tweets rhyme. http://twitter.com/careerdiva

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