Twitter Is Haiku, If You Didn’t Know it by Now
140 characters of prose, in 35 million stanzas. Even Shakespeare would be in awe!
Here I go again, ranting about Twitter, when I should really spend my time doing something more constructive, like finishing my book for example.
It just so happened that today I read on Detroit Free Press an excellent editorial by Maria Puente of USA Today, and somewhere in that article, lost amongst other quotes, there was this pearl of thought by Debbie Weil:
“Great blogging is great writing, and it turns out great Twittering is great writing — it’s the haiku form of blogging.”
When you read such “deep” insight, you cannot help but wonder: how do Debbie’s tweets read? Are they really so profound, so harmonious and poetic? Is Debbie Twitter’s Kobayashi Issa?
So, I ran there, to Twitter’s „find people“ feature, and searched for Debbie. These are some of the latest fragments of “haiku” she shared with her 5081 followers:
“FWIW this was a cliffhanger! After 3 hrs 45 mins on (slow) train fr DC am now at EWR just in time to board flight to Madrid. Phew!!”(and the followers need to know this because…?)
“Embarrassed to admit I don’t speak Spanish. Mais je parle francais assez bien… Madrid, Seville (and 100 degree temps) here we come” (why is not speaking Spanish embarrassing anyway?)
“Did I hear this right?? 27% of married men in Harvard Class of 1974 report having had an extramarital affair #HR74″ (I guess this is very important for their unsuspecting wives)
Click to enlarge.
I could go on, but I guess the examples above are pretty edificatory for the following: there is no great writing involved, no haiku, no genius communicative strategy. Nada! (Lucky me, I do speak Spanish, and French, and Italian, and German, and English, and Romanian – so how is this relevant anyway?)
You know, I did remember a Kobayashi Issa haiku that applies to the Debbie quote above, and to the whole Twitter phenomenon by extrapolation:
how irritating!
the wild geese freely
call their friends
About the Author
Mihaela Lica is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Force for Good, Reuters and others), with an experience of over 7 years in online PR and SEO. Mihaela writes for SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, and other online publications. She also maintains a personal blog called eWritings. Follow Mig on Twitter or send her an email at mig [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.
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Always,
Phil 
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Comment by Mauri Yambo on 11 June 2009:
Greetings from Nairobi, Kenya.
I do appreciated your contribution to the on-going conversation regarding the quality of writing on Facebook and Twitter. I did mention in my own blog-post yesterday that Maria Puente’s piece is a valuable piece of advice to all who would like to add value to their Facebook or Twitter contributions. Content is the real “King of Kongo”, but it has to be one’s own and it has to seek elevation beyond the mundane. ReTweets are other people’s content, which we pass along. Pepy’s diary entry on a bad (“down”) day should not be today’s standard “update” — particularly when we are “up” and/or “about”.
Still, the average social-networker (or social capitalist) does need a measure of orientation — indeed, in view of all the water that has flowed under the bridge, re-orientation — but is currently left, in this particular jungle, to his/her own Twittering devices. That is not the way the Great Conversation that’s social networking is going to truly benefit from the angularity of our individual “takes” on the wonderful diversity that’s the human condition.
I did also quote the Debby Weil “pearl” in my blog post yesterday, but her own contributions which you cite certainly do not measure up to her own stated standards or ideals, or to those that Maria Puente was clearly rooting for. We do need standards of quality, to shovel a large section of today’s “diarists” out of the rut of mediocre articulation/cnversation.
Incidentally, let me say this and then I’m out of here, the Kobayashi Issa haiku that you quote does not — certainly not in the English translation that I see — meet the 5-7-5 standard which many of us are attempting to preserve today in Twitter. What do you say?
Comment by Mihaela Lica on 11 June 2009:
Thank you for the valuable contribution to this article, Mauri. You understood perfectly what I was trying to say, although I was a bit too sarcastic.
About the haiku at the end: since this is just a translation, probably the original does meet the standard. If it doesn’t, I don’t think that anyone tweeting haikus can actually measure with the fame and the depth attained by Kobayashi Issa, who is one of the fathers of haiku, as we all probably know. I am sure we have many talented people on Twitter, but comparing them with a poet of Kobayashi Issa’s caliber is like comparing a Fiat with a Ferrari if you know what I mean.
Comment by Mauri Yambo on 12 June 2009:
Mihaela, I see what you mean. Ahsante!
Still, you put Kobayashi Issa in a context which makes him appear mean-spirited and banal. You “use him”! In that context, the content that one espies in the haiku you’ve chosen is by no means a Ferrari — and not a Fiat. What one sees is a Tuk Tuk — so plentiful in real and virtual Mumbai, and Kisumu here. In that spirit, you commit the very same sin you accuse Debbie Weil of!
Please remember that there is a Ferrari-maker and there are Ferraris. Let’s not go overboard (or over the cliff), on a bad day the Ferrari-maker may ofer us something “less than…”
Here’s a gift “Fiat” of a haiku from me to you, titled “Easter Sunday Afternoon”:
God’s grey clouds return,
A constant plane-like rumbling.
Drips, ‘blique thing. Ref-rains!
Yours,
Mauri
Comment by Mihaela Lica on 12 June 2009:
Mauri, that’s a very beautiful haiku, by no means a Fiat!
What I mean when saying that comparing modern writers with one of fathers of haiku was that they should be humble, not that they are bad writers.
I really don’t see how I made Issa appear mean-spirited in the article though.
Comment by Sam on 12 June 2009:
I’m a published and award-winning poet (BBC, UK Poetry Society, League of Canadian Poets), and am part of the Twitter generation. As in the print world there is good poetry and bad poetry. I’ve come across a lot of good poetry on Twitter, and the 140-character constraint has reinvogarated my own poetry. For example, my tagline:
For you I wish that these poems were rubies, borne by my own caravan from Xi’an out of Shaanxi, through Persia, along the northern Silk Road.
Check out more – as well as the writing of many of my friends – at @semaphore.
Comment by Mihaela Lica on 12 June 2009:
Beautiful, Sam! Honestly, I wish all tweets would have the quality of your (and Mauri’s) writing. Sadly this is not (yet) the case. My only advice to people like Debbie Weil: practice what you preach. Don’t say that “twitter is the haiku of blogging” if you cannot measure up to your statements.
Sam, I think you and your friends should collect all the gems you are talking about, and publish a twitter haiku ebook.
That would be something worthwhile.
Comment by Sam on 12 June 2009:
Thanks Mihaela, you are exactly right.
By the way, such a collection as you envision is already in the works. There is also a collection of poetry from established poets who are on Twitter (not necessarily Twitter-based poetry, though, although my own contribution to the issue is).
It was recently published by OCHO magazine as a special Twitter issue. It’s available as an ebook or in print from Amazon.
http://issuu.com/didimenendez/docs/ocho24
http://www.amazon.com/OCHO-featuring-Twitter-Poets-MiPOesias/dp/1442194340/
I leave you with one of my haiku (in the humorist spirit of poet Wendy Cope), a distillation of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland:
April is cruel.
Stetson’s a fool. I’m coping.
Damyata shantih
Comment by Liliana Dumitru-Steffens on 12 June 2009:
Sam, this is the kind of work we should be promoting, and I think Mig agrees. When the book you mentioned is ready, please send us a notice, either in the comments here, or at pr@pamil-visions.net (both Mig and I have access to this address) and we would be honored to promote it.