Welcome to the Boykitten’s (or humanity's, take your pick) most collaborative effort ever! Poetry by Emily Dickinson is for all to partake in its many pleasures. Steve Roggenbuck is the mastermind behind this deceptively simple concept. Multiple levels of collaboration are built into the concept. This allows people the ease to take part in the project in as big or as small of a role as they want.
Two roles are available to anyone interested. You can work as a remix/editor of the material once it has all been compiled. Some material might be usable as-is, but other material might require forms of editing or rephrasing. While this may be wonderful work, going through the process of editing (and you can contact Steve at steveroggenbuck[at]gmail.com for information on this) there’s a second role to play as well.
You can tag your tweets with #poetrybyemilydickinson. Any tweet with this tag will be considered as source material for this poetry project. So instead of using twitter for whatever you’re supposed to use twitter for, you can actually contribute something to literature and society in general. What Steve wants to do is show that Twitter and blogs are not useless for writers, but actually an important instrument in creating new bodies of work.
Going through the tag, I’ve been introduced to countless new twitter friends and followers, including the 2011 Poet Laureate. I’m not sure if this is one of the desired results of Steve’s project, but it is an additional benefit. If you bother reading all the tweets under the hashtag, you’ll see a vast variety of people and ideas. Somehow, Steve’s managed to create an entire community of poets based off of a single phrase. These people have begun to follow and re-tweet each other. Already I have this as one of my saved searches, and I check up on it to see how people are doing. Personally, I don’t know how Steve is going to deal with re-tweets of the better ones (or more interesting ones).
Part one involves the creation of this vast body of material. What I’d suggest is for you to do it, in order to create an even better project. The more participation this gets, the better it will be. Additionally, you might gain new followers and discover new online poets at the same time. Or you might become interested in poetry, which would accomplish another one of Steve’s goals.
Of course, Steve wants more people to get interested in this art form. Hopefully, by having such an easy way to encourage participation, he’ll be able to attract plenty of new people who otherwise might not have engaged or thought about poetry. That’s one result. Another will be the hope of Google-bombing the phrase “poetry by Emily Dickinson”.
As I’m writing this, I notice the exact (un-spaced) phrase of ‘poetrybyemilydickinson’ is already the third result on Google search. So perhaps with a few more tweets, this can become the number one result. Steve’s calculations suggest this would hijack roughly 50,000 visitors per month. Instead of people simply finding out more about some dead person, they’ll find out more about an alive and kicking Steve Roggenbuck, a boykitten in the truest sense of the term. Consider Steve the Santa Claus of online poetry, wrapping up gifts for your brain.
I encourage everyone to partake in this fun and interactive collaboration. Join the party. Participate today. Learn how to engage others through the power of poetry!
PS:
If you would prefer to have poems of over 140 characters, there is another option as well. The fantastic concept is you ask to be added onto the author list. After that, you’ll be approved to publish a poem on there, full-length. Double-posting is not allowed, meaning if you’re the most recent poet, you need to wait until there’s a new submission. Go here "Let People Poems" to learn more about this wonderful site. Thank you.