One's-Self I Tweet

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This morning's comics page featured at least two strips focusing on Twitter as a literary genre. There was Doonesbury, in which Larry King demonstrates his command of the form:

And Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat edits Pig's copy of Leaves of Grass:


In fact, Whitman is easy to twittify:

One's-Self I sing—Of Physiology from top to toe; the Female equally with the male I sing; Of life immense—for freest action form'd.

To a historian: You who celebrate bygones! I, habitan of the Alleghanies, chanter of personality, I project the history of the future.

And so on.



12 Comments

  1. Graeme said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 7:57 pm

    6/10. Bit too puntcuated for a tweet. '!' can stay.

  2. mae said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 10:12 pm

    The real tweeter was Virginia Woolf. From the beginning of "The Waves" —

    "I see a ring," said Bernard, "hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light."
    "I see a slab of pale yellow, said Susan, "spreading away until it meets a purple stripe."
    "I hear a sound," said Rhoda, "cheep, chirp; cheep; chirp; going up and down." …
    "The dining-room window is dark blue now," said Bernard, "and the air ripples above the chimneys."
    "A swallow is perched on the lightning-conductor," said Susan. "And Biddy has smacked down the bucket on the kitchen flags."

    and on and on

  3. fiddler said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 10:57 pm

    Is there a haiku twitter group?

  4. uberVU - social comments said,

    November 4, 2009 @ 12:30 am

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by languagelog: One's-Self I Tweet: This morning's comics page featured at least two strips focusing on Twitter as a literary genre…. http://bit.ly/2dzxHO

  5. Kellen Parker said,

    November 4, 2009 @ 2:23 am

    there's plenty of haiku, if not specifically a group (though i'm sure there's that as well). just search for #haiku.

  6. Dierk said,

    November 4, 2009 @ 3:51 am

    He hasn't done it with his newest [Blood's a Rover] but I guess James Ellroy's next may be tweeted. His style lends itself quite naturally.

  7. Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér said,

    November 4, 2009 @ 7:10 am

    There is a Haiku group on Identi.ca – http://identi.ca/group/haiku.

  8. Richard Howland-Bolton said,

    November 4, 2009 @ 8:34 am

    Haiku too easy, Hairimeraku's the way to go:

    See that girl there
    Climbing the stair.
    She should know,
    Crowd below…
    Underwear.

    (140 chars!)

  9. Richard Howland-Bolton said,

    November 4, 2009 @ 8:39 am

    Of course Hairimeraku should have 17 on, rhyme AABBA and be redolent with seasonal and salacious aspects, as befits their combined ancestry.

  10. Aaron Davies said,

    November 4, 2009 @ 9:09 am

    Accidental Haiku attempts to find all tweets that conform to haiku rules.

  11. peter said,

    November 4, 2009 @ 11:43 pm

    The following letter appeared the The Guardian newspaper (London, UK) in April 2008.

    "Like many people nowadays, I rarely have time to sit down and read a whole haiku (Letters, March 22; Letters, March 29). This prompted my "Short Poem About Brevity" –

    Haiku, why ramble so?

    Steven Handsaker

  12. carla said,

    November 5, 2009 @ 2:35 pm

    This very popular excerpt from Whitman's Song of Myself is already pre-trimmed for tweetability at 96 characters:

    Do I contradict myself?
    Very well then I contradict myself,
    (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

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