"#ode @GrecianUrn": New Media Micro-poems For July

So every month this year, I've been setting little goals for myself-- sort of a way to break the traditional ominous monolithic New Years Resolution into reasonable chunks. Anyway, it doesn't matter what I did these previous months, but for July I've decided to try to post, every day, a 140-character or less prose poem on popular micro-blogging website Twitter (if you still don't know what that is you can ask your mom or your dad and they can maybe help you set one up). 

This is an idea I've kicked around for awhile, and if I was still an undergrad I think I would've liked to have done another Summer Fellows project based around it, but, ah well, I guess I'm just doing it for fun. Ideally, this will not only be a neat exercise in working around fairly strict formal constraints, but an experiment with how poetry functions in relationship to new social media (and an opportunity to thaw out my prose poetry chops).

Of course this isn't an entirely new idea; short fiction in particular has been getting shorter and shorter over the past few decades, and poets have been churning out epigrams since before Martial. Still, the idea of ultimate conciseness and economy is something that grabs every writer at some point, and holds an undeniable allure. Italo Calvino, in writing about Quickness as a literary ideal in Six Memos for the Next Millenium, writes

I would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line. But so far I haven't found any to match the one by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso: "Cuando desparto, el dinosauro todavia estaba alli" (When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there).

(and of course, how much of Stein's Tender Buttons could easily fit into Twitter's narrow text-boxes?)

Anyway, if you'd like to see what I come up with, I invite you to follow my experiment here  (new account so I don't bug people who don't give a shit about poems). I'll be right up front and say there's a perhaps 75% chance this will be a trainwreck, but hopefully it will at least be an interesting one.