Tweets that rhyme (sometimes!)
I started tweeting poetry on a daily basis in 2015 to mark the 150th birthday of our greatest English language poet, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). It was an enjoyable experience.
My #YeatsQuote tweets encouraged me to take out my old copy of Yeats's Collected Poems and it became my daily companion throughout the year. I have owned it since I was a literature student at University College Cork in the 1970s and it has travelled the world with me for the best part of four decades now. It was an eye-opener to read it from cover to cover last year, discovering poems previously unknown to me, and rediscovering others, years, even decades, after I first encountered them.
Tweeting a daily #YeatsQuote gave me some new insights into his work. Virtually every single Yeats poem has a quotable quote containing 140 characters or less. Many Yeats poems can sustain multiple tweets.
By reading his work from first to last, I was also able to trace the evolution of his language from the late-romantic mode of:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams
and
I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree
written in the 1890s to
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart
with its gritty modernism, and written in the 1930s.
During 2015, I reckon that my #YeatsQuote tweets were seen between 1 and 2 million times. I also blogged about Yeats,
highlighting his importance as an Irish literary great, 'Ireland's Shakespeare' as I argued in one of my talks on his life and work.
Yeats was also an acute observer of the Ireland of his time and is of great value to us in deciphering the mysteries of Irish history a century ago.
As the year 2015 came to a close, I fully intended to discontinue my poetic tweeting, but a number of my twitter followers encouraged me to keep up the daily flow of poetry. It became clear to me that the lines I made available on Twitter were valued by many who encountered them. In fact, much of the feedback I receive about my twitter activities relates to my poetry quotes.
This year I have turned my attention to other Irish poets, George Russell (AE), Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan and many others. This has meant delving into long-neglected collections and anthologies. And what a pleasure it has been for me to start my day by reading a poem with an eye for an image or an insight that deserves its moment in the sun, social media style. For some of my followers, the lines I post jog agreeable memories of bygone times.
I have found Seamus Heaney to be, after Yeats, the most tweetable Irish poet. This suggests that tweetability may be a useful barometer of literary value, although I would not dare claim it to be the only one! I cannot count the number of times I have come across a perfectly good Irish poem only to discover that it did not have that indispensable ingredient, a self-standing quote that I could tweet.
My #IrishPoetry quotes are commonly seen between 1,000 and 2,000 times, but sometimes lines I post will catch the imagination of my Twitter followers and generate many more views.
I took particular satisfaction in introducing some less well-known Irish poets to the twittersphere including three diplomat/poets, Denis Devlin, Valentin Iremonger and Richard Ryan. It was gratifying to find that a quote from a school and university friend of mine, Seán Dunne, who sadly died at a tragically-young age, was seen almost 4,000 times by twitter users.
I float on the river of what happens:
A boat adrift
When the rudder's lost.
You are with me. Riverbanks beckon.
But by far my most popular poetry tweet of the year - in fact the tweet of mine seen by the most people ever - was a quote from John Montague which I posted just weeks before his death on 10 December 2016:
there is no sea
except in the tangle
of our minds
the wine dark
sea of history
on which we all turn
turn and thresh
and disappear.
When the poet's death was announced, these lines started to be retweeted and liked multiple times. As I write this blog, Montague's words have been retweeted 269 times and seen some 94,000 times. Any poet with that number of readers of one of his or her books would be very pleased indeed.
Now Twitter as a medium comes in for a lot of criticism on account of the aggressive, unruly behaviour of some of its users. But it does have a large contented domain populated by people quietly happy in their skins, and devotedly open-minded, searching for snippets of revelation and understanding in the crowded byways of social media. It may just be that Twitter is a perfect forum for disseminating the wisdom of our poets.
The Irish novelist and humourist, Flann O'Brien, once wrote that 'there is no excuse for poetry' on account of the fact that it provides poor value for money with so few words on each page. But its economy of language may be its virtue as a Twitter phenomenon! The right words in the right order and packing a quick, byte-sized creative punch.
Could I make an appeal to all poets to remember the 140 character limit (including your name if you want it to be known who the author is) when sitting down to put quill to parchment! Remember all those people out there who want to consume your work three lines at a time. They are good people deserving to access the fruits of your muse. Think not of the Japanese @haiku but embrace the disciplines of the @tweetu. A #Nobel Prize for Tweetry may be on its way to you - by DM!
Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in London