In this missive:
A micro poem about 10,000 year old flint figures excavated in Jordan
A DARE
An Update about September’s Outlier Hour
I signed up for a Twitter account seventeen years ago. I intended to write micro poems on there, back when the character limit was 140. I haven’t used it in around 15 years, and all those little poems are gone, the account long ago deleted. Recently, I had to create a new profile for my writing career which I hardly ever use. I feel for the activists who used the platform to network and disseminate information, radical communities who poured all they had into this place they didn’t own. We are renters online, paying with our stories, images and our alliances. And now we are moved off our virtual spaces.
Our places online are being destroyed, broken down, contaminated. Can we find new ways to talk to each other, to share our work and the work of others. Could Substack be an option? I am on Mastodon, which I love, but my community isn’t really there with me. [https://wandering.shop/@AllysonShaw]
I still entertain the idea of a micro poem of calculated brevity. Here is an ekphrasis* poem in the form of a 140 character Tweet that will never make it to “X.” It’s behind a paywall where perhaps AI bots can’t scrape it.
*Ekphrasis is a literary exercise describing a work of art.
I dare you, my Outliers, to writer an ekphrasis poem of 140 characters and post it in the comments.