Party out of bounds

Last night's Twitter Poet Party was lively, chaotic and fun. I had never participated in a Twitter chat before, although many groups have them regularly. With more than 600 tweets in an hour from the participating poets and party-goers, the messages were coming fast and furious. I used Hootsuite to set up a dedicated stream for the #poetparty hashtag, which helped me keep up with the conversations. You can read the transcript at the 32 poems blog at this link.

D.A. Powell (@powell_da), January O'Neil (@januaryoneil), Aimee Nezhukumatathil (@aimeenez), Susan Rich (@susanrichpoet), Oliver de la Paz (@Oliver_delaPaz), Kelli Russell Agodon (@kelliagodon) and me (@collinkelley) were the poets invited by Deborah Ager from 32 poems (@32poems) to take part. We had some fabulous lurkers, too, like Karen Head (@poetphd), Shann Palmer (@shannpalmer) and Anne Haines (@annehaines) among many others.

Each of the poets contributed a line from one of their own poems, a line from a favorite poem by someone else, talked about organizing a collection for publication, mentors, social activism and shared links to useful sites. It's amazing how much information can be shared in an hour with just 140 characters. It also shows the power of Twitter as a tribe and community builder of like-minded folks. 

While we were tweeting away, D.A. Powell was constructing a poem from some of our tweets. You can read the poem and Kelli Agodon's wrap up at her blog, Book of Kells. 

Poetry and Twitter have become intertwined for me since I posted the Poets on Twitter list on my blog in May 2009 (and the follow up 2.0 list) later on, not to mention editing the special Twitter issue of OCHO magazine. January O'Neil said it's time for me to suck it up and get a 3.0 list together. I'm moving it to the top of my project list.