Twitter poetry and other cultural occasions
What’s happen/ed/ing to Twitter really sucks. It was a good place.
After getting two degrees in poetry, taking endless workshops, and making some friends along the way, that silly little app might be the site of the best poetry community I’ve found: diverse, engaged, surprising, and supportive, Twitter poets make the platform what it is for me.
Even as it slowly dies, destroyed by a wealthy megalomaniac seemingly for sport, I sincerely believe that Twitter remains a valuable space for various arts communities. I like it there, and I feel comfortable there, and because of that a lot of my early drafts blossom in that space.
Sometimes that’s just because poetry Twitter is a good place for test balloons, seeing as how it’s so darn supportive and such, but other times my drafts actually rise out of what I read and engage with on the site.
Poetry can be a great way to engage in “the conversation” because A) it intercedes the instinct to get caught in petty online arguments and B) it’s a good way to avoid putting my foot in my mouth, because when you write something in a poem you (usually) take a few breaths between the first word and the last.
One recent example of poetry doing both A and B came in response to a perfect Twitter mini-controversy: a couple white poets, without bothering to look any deeper than a single tweet, started crying foul about losing a competition to “AI poetry” written by a (widely accepted to be) brilliant Black poet who uses AI as an interlocutor for, in this case, reading the work of the great Gwendolyn Brooks.
When used correctly, AI can make magic happen without undercutting the vital work of the poet — I think of it as kind of similar to poets who work in translation, which is full of “invention” and not just process work. Unfortunately, the white poets got way up on a high horse and from there showed their whole backsides, falling for a gut-reaction panic and dragging the poet in question before having to backtrack backtrack backtrack once everyone pointed out their mistake.
So I wrote a poem about looking for the worst in the future.
Writing this poem pulled me back from the brink of a spat with one of the aformentioned white poets, and also helped me avoid my own gut-reaction response: while I am pro-some-uses-of-AI, I’ve been known to share a little bit of the AI panic myself, especially when I think about what’s yet to come (AI still sucks at actually composing original poetry, but it won’t be forever). During the process of writing “Sometimes spiders are your friend,” I was able to locate that ambivalence in my speaker and process it, chew it, and spit it out: I think I’ve got a little less panic than I did before.
In addition to being a good spot for poets and poetry and all the other stuff poets do, Twitter is full of spaces of cultural occasion, so to speak, where culture isn’t just digested but it’s created. One such space is Black Twitter, which will never ever be called Black X, no matter how hard Elon tries to make fetch happen.
A week or so ago, I wrote a poem titled “Do the right thing,” which I wrote in response to the Battle of Montgomery, an all-out brawl for all the right reasons: a half-dozen drunks getting off a boat at a marina picked a fight with a Black security guard and, when the security guard objected, they began actively beating him. Badly. But that wasn’t the battle, just the match: the brawl began when Black folks started appearing from thin air — and, in one case, from the water — to save the security guard and eventually subdue the drunks, most famously through the efforts of a man who wielded a mean folding chair. The drunks were in turn summarily arrested.
Here's the thing: when a group of Black men beat up a group of white people and the police get involved, no matter how good the reason for the violence, it tends to end poorly for the Black men. Sometimes very poorly. But, in this instance, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, it did not.
As before, I didn’t know quite what to say about all of this but, corny as it might seem, poetry helped me find my voice.
The miracle of the Battle of Montgomery wasn’t the victory, or the chair, but the survival: everyone who did the right thing, and boy if you watch the video can you see it’s the right thing, got to go home afterward. That made for what was undoubtedly a cultural occasion, a moment that sparked something universal all across Black twitter, from poets to pop stars.
Well, thanks for reading all of that — I’m sort of thinking out loud here, and I appreciate you coming along for the ride.
It’s worth noting that sometimes Twitter isn’t all that deep, and is just a place for good old fashioned complaint. The next newsletter will delve into one of those!