Reflection on a Tweet Party

Several of us participated in a Tweet Party (poetry jam) on Tuesday night. Most of us tweeted by design, and three accidentally stumbled in. You can see the completed edited version of the jam at TweetSpeak Poetry, under the title of "Love at the Masquerade Ball." The theme was “Love in Character,” and it used famous fictional and not-so-fictional lovers as the starting point (Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Yuri Zhivago and Lara, Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, and so on).

I have a dual role in these jams – I participate and I edit the final version. Editing (for me) means following the jam via Tweetdeck with a search open for the #tsp hashtag, Twitter open, and Microsoft Word open, so I can copy and paste from Twitter. The jam lasts for an hour, and sometimes the tweets are flying so fast and thick that I find myself almost breathless while I’m tweeting, reading, copying and pasting, commenting – well, it’s busy. But great fun. The #tsp hashtag is important for capturing all of the contributions, because not all of the participants follow each other on Twitter.

Here are a few of my own contributions to the jam.


Antony: I remember you before the asp.
Cleo: I remember you before the sword.
We danced in the sand
Under the light of the pyramid moon.
She turned to fortunetellers
To see the lines of the sand.

***

In John's England did I
Find myself
A proper lady.
They said I was spectacle,
Eye-catching of courtiers.
The redness of mine,
The whiteness of John's,
Our skins peeled together.
The courtesies of courtiers
Were like sharpened knives at the table.

***

So said Delilah, she of the Philistines.
He wanted stars
But was blinded by pokers of light.

***

Frankly, my dear
I wish for hand of lilac scent
To touch my brow.
Will you remember me, tomorrow, Rhett?
Another tomorrow, another day,
With pride, with prejudice, perhaps with love.

***


Of all the famous loves I've known
Across the pages of imagination,
None surpasses my own true love

***

My green earth
My good earth,
The soil of my love.

***

As the sun fair doth rise in the east
As the moon most pale doth set in the west,
Strangers when they met,
Bonded souls when they parted.
In the cold mist did
Yuri touch
The pale cheek of Lara.
The reds and the whites,
He thought,
Were no longer wines but soldiers.
The trees,
All aspens,
Sang of love and Russian nights.
Was Lara the Russian Guinevere?

***

For another view of the jam, see L.L. Barkat’s Ticket to Party.

And Maureen's Tweets of Love at the Masquerade Ball.