Yes, I know it has been a while since my last post. Real life happened. I am now, however, finally getting to a point where I am not so emotionally exhausted that I can’t string together more than 140 characters at a time.
Speaking of which, I made an odd discovery about myself yesterday: apparently I obtain a small sense of validation from being re-tweeted. And it actually makes perfect sense to me. After all, a re-tweet is essentially someone else saying: “see what this person posted, yes I agree with it and think it is valuable enough to pass on”. And that makes me feel like my ideas, or even just my words, carry some minor value in the social media spaces in which I have begun playing. It is nice to get that sense that I am doing something right.
I quickly replied with my own Haiku about Lotus Notes 8 having crashed on me. And again, once I was able to Fix Lotus 8 and continue on with my day.
As my day progressed, another friend from Facebook (I have my tweets pushed to my Facebook status) commented on my Haiku and called me out for thinking I shouldn’t have time to write Haiku about Lotus Notes. This gave me a moment’s pause until I realized that it really took no time at all. Haiku is an easy form of poetry to mimic (NOT an easy form to master, or even do well, mind you); being an English lit major with an emphasis in poetry from years back, I find it fairly easy to write in the 5/7/5 format.
Over the course of the remaining day, as I sat back and pondered Twitter Haiku a bit more, I came to realize the brilliance of it all: Haiku is the perfect format for Twitter. The 5/7/5 structure fits nicely with Twitter’s 140 character limit. This same limitation also leverages the ability of Haiku to convey complex imagery and ideas in small structured bursts.
While I will never claim to write good Haiku, nor can I even come close to genuine traditional Japanese Haiku, I do find creativity and amusement in writing modern English Haiku. I tend to focus on and enjoy the dichotomy of technology in a poetic form traditionally using nature based motifs. Error Code Haiku is a personal favourite…
Which should explain why I found brilliance in Twitter Haiku. Perfection!
So, my challenge to my Twitter friends: leverage the Haiku form to create your tweets for as long as you can stand it. I am certain that pure brilliance will emanate from this experiment.
My challenge to all friends not on Twitter: Find your muse. Explore some sense of creativity every day. Join Twitter and start writing Haiku, or update your blog only in quatrains. The idea here is to find something simple and easy to do which still provides a sense of creativity which I know we all lack most of the time.
A Twitter challenge.
Create Haiku update tweets.
Revel in brilliance.
Read more on Haiku at Wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku
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