In September of 2011, to promote this blog, I started writing one rhyming tweet per day, just after writing the blog. The character limit is the format of the poem. The poem encapsulates the idea of the blog. For instance, a couple of days ago, after blogging about Amy Cuddy’s TEDTalk on how to achieve success in life by altering your posture, I wrote “To get a job, or to get laid, stand up straight, be unafraid”
Gratuitous Nude Photo of Heidi Klum
I think that’s a clever little poem and it encapsulates the basic idea of all of the self-help through the power of positive thinking programs.
Anyway, shortly after I started doing it I realized that as well as promoting the blog, it had a value in its own right. It’s sort of a time capsule, a historical document. One by one they can be kind of dumb (rhyming “if” with “fiscal cliff” wasn’t exactly brilliant) but taken as a bunch, they can remind one of the zeitgeist of the time, of those stories which were at the top of the news cycle and are now forgotten, like when I wrote in September of 2012 “Seal is taking it rather hard that Heidi is boinking her bodyguard,” or back in May with”Joe Ricketts is a slimy creep, it’s not like the tickets to his games are cheap.”
Sometimes, the poem stands on its own and the subject of the blog is pushed out entirely. When I wrote “Sometimes a guy might be a jerk but still you must admire their work,” I was writing about Mark Zuckerberg but the principle could be applied equally to Mel Gibson, Elia Kazan, or Thomas Edison.
Anyway, since I’ve been writing these for over a year and have quite a collection, I felt it was time to put them together into a book, which I have done. It’s called Twoems, which is a portmanteau word for Twitter Poems, and it’s available on Amazon. Of course, I’m hoping that after you read this blog, you’ll pop right over there and buy it. If, like me, you are a cheapskate who hates paying money for books, I’ll get them posted to the poetry section of this blog eventually and you’ll be able to read them for free. Your choice.
And now I draw close to the end of today’s blog about my book of twitter poems and I will go over to Twitter and write another tweet about today’s blog and it just goes on and on and on like the view in the mirrors in the changing cubicles at clothing stores. Infinity.
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