Short Update on the Twepic

The "twepic" (Twitter epic poem) (the result of our Twitter poetry bash on Tuesday night) seems to have caused something of a minor stir. Even people at work who follow me on Twitter were asking me about it today. Yes, they think I'm decidedly odd. Poetry on Twitter?

To answer a couple of questions: First, no, I wasn't working on it at 4 a.m. Thursday morning. This blog is hosted on a server in California and posts are recorded on Pacific time. So it was actually 6 a.m. where I live (and that was early enough).

Yes, it did take some time. I had to make sure I had collected all of the tweets, which was easier said than done because we (including me) were somewhat inconsistent adding the #tsp hashtag. Fortunately, I follow all of the poets involved, so I could go back and collect the tweets. If I missed a couple, they'll let me know, and I'll work them in. After collecting what I believe were all of them in a Word document, I then went through that, cutting and pasting in roughly chronological order. I had to move some contributions around, because some of us like to think before we post (although that's not a problem for me).

We will do another one and will post the date and time on our blogs, Facebook and Twitter about it. @TchrEric has set up a blog site especially for this, and we will eventually be posting everything there -- the collective results and well as the contributions by individuals. And we'll also be using the blog to note and promote poets, poetry books and such. (@TchrEric and I have been joking by email about incorporating as a new industrial/poetical empire, with @llbarkat as CEO.)

Finally, I was the one who, in the middle of the jam, suddenly found myself being followed by a "big bad vampiress." Exactly the same thing happened two weeks earlier with the first poetry jam -- same follower, in fact. So while fellow poets were contributing, I checked the profile of the vampiress, and discovered it was (1) a man who (2) is an author (3) in the final phases of checking page proofs for his novel about (4) a big bad vampiress. Yes, I felt better. Two porn sites and a get-rich-quick-on-Twitter scheme also suddenly appeared as followers, but I blocked them and kept the Vampiress.

Who knows, maybe she'll join the next poetry jam.