The Twittering Author

The particularity of a writer on Twitter: this is not People magazine’s best-dressed list or a dance competition, an improv comedy show or a submarine mission. These are words, the fodder and folly of writers and the element in which they should excel. We can only expect so much from Lindsay Lohan’s tweets, an update on her sobriety, at best. And, while, yes, Twitter was designed for just such exhilarating celebrity news, this social media is also a neatly crafted space for writers to test their wordsmithing skills. As for the metalsmith, the work becomes more difficult and more intricate with smaller objects.

Some authors — the more famous ones, mostly — have found an ease in creating public personas on Twitter. Neil Gaiman (1.6 million followers) and Margaret Atwood (270K followers) both excel at engaging with Twitter users and, essentially, being “normal,” link-sharing, retweeting people who happen to write bestselling books. These are not the Twittering authors who interest me.

No, I am interested in the lesser known. The writers I love tweet about nonsense. They tweet because it’s amusing. They tweet stories and dreams and observations that succinctly demonstrate why they write, that they must. They tweets shards of wisdom so sharp that I feel the dullness of my own tweets, and I hope that my RTs do not debase their gracefully worded morsels.

Let’s begin with the poets, who have less presence than the (always louder, longer, always clamoring) novelists. I present D.A. Powell, an award-winning poet and 2011 Guggenheim Fellow (2.2K+ followers):

@Powell_DA: I constantly doubt my vocation, even though I’m not a young nun.

@Powell_DA: Sometimes I forget my own esophagus

Powell’s last book of poetry, Chronic, garnered the following remark from critic John Freeman in the Los Angeles Times: “There are poets who show us the exterior world and poets who ferry news of their inner turmoil. Yet very few possess the double vision required to do both.” Freeman may as easily have been commenting on Powell’s Twitter account. Few writers (few anybody) have successfully used Twitter to interact with readers by exposing their vulnerabilities while maintaining a high standard of language and revelation — but Powell has. Sometimes, I, too, forget my own esophagus. The reminders of the little things, like esophagi, are exactly the gems I expect from a poet as great as Powell.

I would not be surprised to read either of these tweets in one of Powell’s poems. The former, a confession of doubt despite success, both reveals the poet as a real person — the tweet received 4 replies and over 10 retweets — and, in characteristic cheekiness, reiterates his cleverness as Powell turns only 64 characters into a commentary on life choices.

Enter Arda Collins (350+ followers), a young poet whose less prolific Twitter account nonetheless offers up:

@ardacollins: Vespers at Target.

@ardacollins: I just went into my toolbox and took out a hammer and I have no idea why. In a parallel universe I am doing something w. a hammer now.

In Collin’s first book of poetry, It Is Daylight (a Yale Series of Younger Poets winner), she excels at creating just the same unsettling dichotomies, a world (or a parallel one) that is both trivial and inexplicably captivating. What would Vespers at Target be like, I wonder — the combination of America’s religious past and consumerist future? In only 18characters, Collins conjures a wholly original scene that teems with images and sounds embedded in the readers’ memories, or, at least, in their imaginings of Target and vespers. I can see the choir in front of the lawn furniture, can smell the glowing scented candles.

And have we not all retrieved our hammers, our fountain pens, a roll of cellophane, and promptly forgotten why? Give a poet the chance, and she will create a new universe to explain our actions.

Will 140 characters ever be enough to tell a story? Probably not, but the poets, at least, have long found solace in compressed images and simple but weighty strings of words. Enjoy Collins and Powell, but when the tweets tease you or leave you with a lack, read their books.

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In the next installment on tweeting writers: the unconquerable Blake Butler gives me pleasurable headaches, and Ben Greenman writes a lot of puns. . . .