Tweet Your Haiku to PoetrySPARK Saturday September 19

Who knows? Maybe a brisk plunge into crowd-sourced poetry is just what you need before fall comes on with its ghosts and melancholy.

Please consider adding your haiku and senryu to a stream of poetry that will be displayed on large monitors in various venues at SPARKCon, an arts festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Of course, the streaming haiku project is more of a “happening” than a literary event. Perhaps this sort of thing is not your cup of tea. That was my initial response, but then I began thinking . . .

“Anyone who can Twitter can submit a poem to this project. My haiku will be streamed with pop-culture haiku, silly-ku, no-ku-at-all. It’s a haiku stream, not a private pool. Anyone can jump in. I’ll have no control over how my poem will be presented. I have no idea what else will be going on when my poem appears on the big screens. My poem will be like a message in bottle thrown into the wine-dark sea…. Hmmm that’s pretty much what happens to most poetry anyway.”

Here are some details, if you’d like to give this project a try.

1. You’ll meed a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/

I don’t have one yet. I didn’t see the need, but I’ll do it for this project, as an experiment.

Request: Please don’t write The Haiku Foundation asking how to do this or that with Twitter. We don’t have staff waiting for your call (!) Please ask a friend or Google “Twitter how to” and figure things out on your own.

Here are two helpful resources I found:

Newbie’s guide to Twitter (from CNET)

Twitter instructional videos (from Twitter)

2. After you learn a little about Twitter the following details will make sense. They were provided to me by the SPARKCon organizers.

• Keep your poem under 135 characters, total. You can indicate line breaks with a slash if you want.
• Submit your poem on Saturday September 19, from 4:00 PM to Midnight EST
• Use the hashtag #poetryspark to send your poem.
• Alternatively, you can send a direct message (DM) to @poetrySpark and the organizers will retweet your poem at an appropriate time. Here’s an explaination of DM: Twitter 101: What is a DM?

Hope to see you on the big screen!