A Penny for Your Tweets

Texting can be an ill wind that brings no good. If you give some effort to texting in its various forms (IM, Twitter, Gchat, etc.), however, it can become a true art, or at least poetic verse. Several months ago, I opened a Twitter account upon the suggestion of Keastland. I take great enjoyment in crafting my Gchat status messages, and she, therefore, proclaimed it to be the perfect medium for my "stream of consciousness."

I opened an account. Began following and being followed. I tweeted a grand total of six times, and haven't let out a tweet since. You may assume by this pattern that I developed some sense of literary conscience believing tweeting to be somehow beneath me. On the contrary, I liken my response to a kind of stage fright. When placed upon the Twitter stage, I immediately felt a weight upon my creativity. It seemed that every 140-character (or less) post must contain an impressive measure of wit, and I did not possess the perseverance to express my thoughts to the world 140 characters at a time.

Returning to the original question NPR poses in considering new technology as a forum for poetry, "If Shakespeare were alive today, would'st he not Tweet?" Looking for the answer, I turned to Twitter in search of "William Shakespeare". (To revisit Twitter did require the wracking of my brain to remember the password to my neglected account.) While there were two screens-worth of William Shakespeares (fewer though from Stratford-Upon-Avon), I chose to follow the crowd and look at the profiles of the most popular. As you might expect, there were ample re-creations of famous lines from well-known plays, applying Shakespearean wit and wisdom to events and news stories. Perhaps, I did not search enough, but I failed to find any newly inspired creations in the meter of the Bard. With the number of William Shakespeares on Twitter today, the better question might be, If Shakespeare were alive and tweeting, would we be able to tell him apart from his impersonators?