Thursday, April 24, 2008

Twitku

The topic for the EtsyBloggers blog carnival this week is poetry. I don't have a favorite poem, and I aside from the required reading in school and college, I haven't read much poetry since "A Light in the Attic." I wonder whatever happened to my copy of that book.


Anyway, when I realized poetry was the topic for this week's carnival I had a flashback to my second year of college. It was the first day of my Drama and Poetry class and I was the first student to be put on the spot to recite a poem. I just sat there wheels spinning in terror. He told me I could recite a song if I wanted. I spoke the lyrics of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler, which my mom had to buy me the 45 of when I was a kid, and I know all of the lyrics. The only thing that brought relief to such embarrassment was the boy in a flannel shirt tucked into his too-high waisted pants singing, yes singing, "Brown Sugar". So to sum it up, I can only list about 5 poets off the top of my head, can recite zero poems, and the lyrics to many 80s songs. Which left me nothing to talk about other than my favorite 80s songs.

Then I remembered - my mother-in-law, Diane, was the first Twitku champion! What is a twitku? It's a micro version of a haiku! Instead of using lines of five seven and five syllables, you use lines of five seven and five characters. The lines can be separated with a slash, and spaces don't count as characters. Punctuation is left to the discression of the poet. It is all explained here on Scott Schwister's Higher Education blog.

Diane takes it to the next level and imposes her poem onto a picture, as seen here:


Another of my favorites is a picture taken at a local pond:


And this one has a double feature:


More of her tiny poems, as she calls them, can be seen in her tiny poem set on her Flickr page.

And this is my go at it:

8 comments:

diane said...

Thank you for including me on your blog.

Your twitku is lovely - now we need to get you sister involved (I have no hope for your husband, in this area).

And, of course, you need to try out Twitter itself!

Lovely posting.

diane

CREATEaTHOUGHT said...

Wow that is awesome, I never heard about that before! Beautiful!!!

The Nature Nut said...

Cute story - love that dragon fly picture!

snowy652 said...

never heard of twitku --- lovely


blessings ~ Shell

HomeMadeOriginals said...

Love the idea of the twitku

We Are Wedges said...

I never hear of a Twitku before! I will have to read up on it more!

storybeader said...

I've never heard of a twiktu.
that's neat!

Waterrose said...

Very creative!