I think most poets and writers would agree that social media is both a blessing and a curse. While Facebook, Twitter and other social media brings us together across distances both physical and otherwise, they can’t replace real human interaction. That said, this week I ask eleven poets and writers: What is your relationship to social media—and Twitter in particular—as a poet or writer? Here are their answers.
Connections and constraint—the latter particularly true of Twitter. I love the way that I can encounter new work and share my own over social media so quickly; all the same, it is always a bit like opening Borges’ eponymous book of sand, where the moment one turns a page, the book grows, and it becomes seemingly impossible to reach its end or to recover the pages of the past. Twitter is Bergsonian, a thing always moving without much time for self-reflection, and so much gets lost unless you make an effort to do lots of concerted searching. I find myself using it in so many ways: as a place to discover new writers, as a partial source for news headlines, as a place to try to create writing that fits the character count, writing that I sometimes think of as art and most often as a kind of Lilliputian diary entry. It’s so many things all at once. It’s a tool for marketing and conversation and creating bons mots and testing your own ability to use words economically in a tweet and increasingly a space where we do journalism and political commentary, and such a multilayered world will always be chaotic in lovely, strange, and frustrating ways. With all that said: it’s also a place I often feel a need to leave, periodically, because it takes me over and I find myself writing less well or simply writing less altogether. Its absence, to me, is as important as its presence.
—Gabrielle Bellot, @GabbyBellot
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Besides using social media (especially Twitter) for “business” purposes i.e. reach and contacting, I’ve also learned a lot from social media, which has fundamentally shaped my outlook on writing as a marginalized person and socialist.
Three of the most influential writers on my writing career who are on Twitter have been Ken Liu (@kyliu99), Daniel Jose Older (@djolder) and Joyce Chng (@jolantru). I met Ken and Joyce at a small writers’ panel in 2013, while I was still a conscript under Singapore’s National Service laws. At that point as a Malaysian living in Singapore, I wasn’t that politically active but considered myself a liberal. To the best of my memory, Ken talked about writing as a Chinese-American, and including those aspects of himself in his work; at that point, I was convinced only “white work” sold, and was naive enough to ask whether it would not be better to write a white experience for commercial success. He disagreed with me on this, leaving me with some thoughts to chew on. At that panel, I also met Joyce Chng, took down her hand-written business card, and followed her on Twitter.
A few months later, I logged onto Twitter (which I didn’t use that much, at that point) and noticed Joyce retweeting articles from Media Diversified; curious, followed the links. I slowly came to realize there were more perspectives than just those of the white majority, which, sheltered as I was in a heavily-Westernized and allegedly post-racial Singapore, I hadn’t come across. I think it was about this time when Ken Liu’s Hugo Award-winning The Paper Menagerie began making the rounds on my Facebook news feed again, and I followed him on Twitter; his writing was extraordinarily beautiful, and from a perspective not often seen in speculative fiction.
The next few months were spent building connections and learning within “social justice” spaces and following the exploits of disgraced activist Suey Park and her “radical” colleagues. I learned a lot about representation in the media, which is something I still fight for today, and through some of the better contacts I had on Twitter I found Daniel. Daniel’s writing was a slick, almost musical piece of work; I don’t remember the title of the work, but it was set in his Bone Street Rumba universe and involved cockroaches. I followed him immediately after reading it, and bought his first book (Salsa Nocturna) when it was released. His Twitter feed introduced me to Junot Diaz and the discourse around “non-standard English” in work; coming from a country where every other sentence is a creole of non-English words and corrupted or repurposed English words (e.g. “gostan”, for “reverse”, from the British “go astern”) known as Singlish, this considerably freed my writing up, releasing my dialogue from the internalised constraint of having to write “proper” English. Meanwhile, following Ken Liu’s rise through the ranks, while juggling a day job as a lawyer, was inspirational for me as a writer who also (at that point) wanted to be a lawyer, as well as an Asian person in a world and medium dominated by white voices.
I eventually abandoned the “social justice” scene in late 2014 after growing disillusioned with its major personalities, their contradictions and their beliefs. Progressively exploring left-wing spaces led me to uncover a hidden, “alternate” history of violence and resistance; here the dark history of imperialism by the West and the resistance of the Third World/Global South against colonialism was brought into focus, with the historical struggles of China, Cuba, Vietnam, Indonesia and even Malaysia having been shaped significantly by left-wing movements. Studying these histories, and working with them in my writing and poetry, has been a major focus for me; I’m currently trying to explore my personal identity as a member of the global Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in my poetry, as well as thinking of speculative histories and futures of resistance that empower the victims of imperialism while providing alternatives to capitalism.
—Bobby Sun, @colonycollapser
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Twitter is a great place to generate conversations around your work, or works-in-progress. I will often share excerpts from poems to get a ‘temperature’ reading on the work, and see how it’s resonating with people. I may share a line, paired with a question or call to action, sometimes relating to national conversations, or use a post to link to sites where my work has been published or photography from performances. I think it’s important for my art to engage as many senses as possible, so I also use platforms like Soundcloud, where people can actually hear me reading my work. Twitter forces you to be spare and focused about the excerpts of your writing you wish to share. Tweeting is a good exercise for paring down big ideas and using them to join larger conversations. Poetry is one of those art forms that can encapsulate massive ideas in few words.
—Keisha-Gaye Anderson, @KeishaGaye1
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I hang out on social media daily, but I’m becoming more focused about the time I spend there. I’d rather talk on the phone or hang out with folks in the physical realm but that’s not always possible. What I like about social media—twitter in particular—is how I can know about things I find relevant as they unfold. These virtual spaces are like having a megaphone. Like having your ear to the ground. Like you are never alone. If I ask a question, I get useful answers. Help even! But they are not a hug. They are not your best friend cooking chicken soup with you while y’all dance in the kitchen. They are not giggling into your lover’s/lovers’ eyes. But if I am focused when I’m on social media, human contact is often the result. These spaces are community and not.
—Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, @SageEkere
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My favorite tentacle from the word social relates to finding, connecting with, and championing an ally.
Social media: an alliance, the exchange of space, a bridge. Heidegger: The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. Derrida: The ghost is already taking shape.
Twitter and Facebook have connected me to Nigerian poets interested in how Anne Sexton talks about the body. Twitter’s hashtags have become empowering virtualities of movement, transformation, bordertransgression, and utterances by the historically marginalized.
Twitter tells me I joined in March 2013. My Twitter username is @dreamingauze. I recall wanting to use Twitter as a place to both dream and heal. The dreaming occurred. The healing has taken much longer. But I still wrap and unwrap the gauze when I tweet or retweet someone else’s thoughts, their blessings.
Facebook shows me that in March 2013 I was taking pictures of my Dartmouth mug (I can still taste the whip cream towering over the rim). Another picture reflects my disbelief in Joyce Carol Oates’s extensive output (she was a literary idol when I was a teenager). In another image, I am complaining about my neighbors leaving trash in the elevator, blaming their behavior for the building’s roach infestation. I remember how humid that day felt in Miami; how it wrapped itself like cellophane around the palm trees and on the windshields of the residents’ vehicles.
March 2013 also finds me dressing up as a pirate and someone commenting, “Prince?” By the end of the month, the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments on both sides regarding same-sex marriage. The Human Rights Campaign’s yellow equal sign on a blue background turned red and went mainstream. I shared the logo and my allies perpetuated my gesture.
Derrida: archive. Anzaldúa: borderlands. Homi Bhabha: the third space. José Esteban Muñoz: cruising. John: the Word.
From the time I joined Twitter, I have brought up the power of social media in colleges where I’ve worked as an adjunct and even now, as a graduate instructor in creative writing. I bring up working poets who use this space to listen, feel present, and engage. On Twitter, Berta Cáceres becomes part of the narrative. Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s The Verging Cities roams with feet of dirt and hands of papers chuecos. Dr. Maria del Rosario Fuentes is still vigilant. I speak Spanish and someone answers in French, Korean, Italian. Someone “follows,” and the road feels less empty.
When lightning struck the water. When the network went tweet tweet tweet
—Roy G. Guzmán, @dreamingauze
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Social media has played an incredibly important role in my life. I remember the early days of social media—being on Friendster and MySpace; I even had a blog about living in Hollywood on Blogger. Then came Facebook and Twitter, and so much more. I joined Facebook when the only way to join was to have an edu email address; I joined Twitter only months after it was first introduced. I’m an early adapter.
In graduate school, while serving as the Managing Editor of Iron Horse Literary Review at Texas Tech University, I started a Twitter account for the magazine. At the time there were less than ten literary journals and less than a dozen writers on Twitter. It was a quiet time, a time to be playful and experiment. I remember my Senior Editor, Jonathan Bohr Heinen (now Managing Editor of Crazyhorse), and I would tweet daily in the voice of the (iron) horse; there were so many ridiculous tweets about eating back issues or giving visiting writers a ride around campus in exchange for a sugar cube or a carrot stick.
Today, I am grateful to Twitter for introducing me to so many wonderful poets and writers. I met Roxane Gay via Twitter, who would later become my colleague at Eastern Illinois University. I met D.A. Powell, who would become my teacher at Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. I met Russell Bennetts, who would later offer me the position I currently hold as Editor of Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Twitter is a playground of networks that offers the potential for friendships and job opportunities.
Twitter’s feed offers me access to literary and news articles, personal opinions and, sometimes, simply nonsense. I currently manage 6 – 8 Twitter accounts at one time. It takes a lot of concentration to focus on such small bits of information across so many channels, but it exposes me to so many voices in the world. It’s through this inundation of texts that gives me a great appreciation for my time alone when I write. And while this medium is very chaotic I can’t imagine my life without it.
—Ruben Quesada, @rubenquesada
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I just got a Twitter this year. I’m actually not a huge fan of social media but I use it to stay updated on poetry news and to let people know what poetry projects I’m working on.
—Loma (Christopher Soto), @loma_poetry
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I think I use Twitter, and all of social media, to really connect to community. I’m so proud of my community and social media allows me to retweet their success, to engage in conversations, to bring opportunities to their attention. And it’s all about support. Sometimes support also means stepping up to people. I remember a fellow writer once criticized my consistent tweeting at a publication that was being problematic. I responded that I was not tweeting because I expected that pub to change or even answer me (In fact, I have a poem entitled “For All the White Men who Won’t Reply to Me on Twitter” that I read this year at AWP). Instead, I’m writing so my community knows they aren’t alone, that they have someone else in their corner.
I obviously use Twitter in other ways, to talk about my cats, my favorite TV shows, my amazing Intro to Gender Studies Class, etc. but when I think about why I started interacting on Twitter, it’s so I can engage as an active writer in my community. Our literary landscape is a space we can step into, change, in which we move around. We can inspire and transform it, if it’s through sharing opportunities, retweeting an amazing poem, or even a GIF war with one of your favorite writers.
—Suzi F. Garcia, @SuziG
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I only started using Twitter in earnest about a year and a half ago, when it was already considered a dinosaur in the social media realm. (The under 35 set don’t really use it, apparently, preferring Snap Chat and Instagram.)
I’m interested in how to leverage social media in general as it has an amazing reach and, if you have access to a device and internet, is free to use. I see it as a way for people who might otherwise be marginalized by various factors (including geography) to have access to larger audiences.
I use it atypically, I think. I tend to mostly to tweet articles that I think are of interest and important with an eye toward social justice, environmental concerns, poetry, and matters that are relevant to poetry and other arts—and to retweet from people that I follow.
I use it to boost signals, especially creative works by people of color and women and queer folk. I tend not to post personal statements or comments, but will send the occasional photograph.
Also, I don’t have a cell phone so I’m doing it over a web interface! But as of this writing, I have 4K+ followers and have been told by followers that they specifically visit my feed to see what I tweeted. Am always surprised when someone tells me they saw something I tweeted or added on Facebook.
—Hoa Nguyen, @peacehearty
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I have so much to say on this subject but here’s one grab at it—one amidst a range of takes in a stream of cascading possibilities, perhaps not unlike the auto-updates of a Twitter feed.
A lot gets said about the use of social media by writers to build one’s author “platform.” Used in this sense, “platform” is this incredibly nebulous term. But metaphorically speaking at least, a platform is suggestive of something sturdy—a raised stage from which to be seen and to gain reach.
It’d be disingenuous of me to deny my own use of social media for “platform-building” purposes, but one of my deepest interests in social media is actually for its less sturdy and more uncertain qualities. The “ether” of the Internet is full of ethereal entities – those diffuse presences to whom I send my micro-missives, often with little certainty as to their reach, let alone with any promise of a reply. On Twitter especially, I’m reminded that the response to my words isn’t and can’t be pre-programmed. I’m also reminded that my sense of my audience is ultimately speculative, all the more so because my words can end up travelling in unforeseen ways. These are all good things for a fiction writer to keep in mind. The guesswork and unpredictability that I experience in posting to Twitter—and seeing what, if anything, comes back—I can also find in my experiences of sending “posts” (usually known as “pieces” or “books”) to the readers of my fiction.
So I’m drawn to Twitter in particular for its more fluky and random possibilities—the chance that, amidst all those brief transmissions cascading down a screen, someone might be drawn to mine or I to theirs. I like the oddness of those odds.
—Tom Cho, @tom_cho
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If you scroll all the way down to my first tweet, there I am, trying to make everyone laugh. I got a few laughs in the early Twitter days. I read the best Twitter comedians and worked to make my tweets as likeable as possible, even playing with form: the self-deprecating narrative, the “what idiot called it blank instead of punchline,” the long list, the absurd @ at public figures. My tweets even got me my communications job right out of my MFA. I worked hard at presenting a more charming, funny, consumable version of myself online.
In other words, respectable.
The way I used to use Twitter is an apt metaphor for my whole life. I came into this world wanting to love and to be loved, and like, three people would star my efforts. (I’m sure this push-pull of rejection and adoration is what creates the writers’ mind.)
I would continue to use social media this way until tragedy struck in Ferguson, MO. On August 9, 2014, my friend Karen was driving home to St. Louis after visiting me in the early days of my pregnancy, the same night Michael Brown was shot twelve times by Darren Wilson. Twitter was the only source of news about the tragedy as it was happening in real time—no other news outlet would report on it. I read Twitter well into dawn, obsessively refreshing the hashtag #Ferguson and retweeting everything I could. Everyone needed to know. (There is so much more to say about the everyone I am specifically addressing, but I’ll leave it at: Boulder, 90 percent white; Denver, 70 percent, where I got my MFA.)
A shift also started happening in my online presence. I shared Danez Smith’s poem, “alternate names for black boys” on August 18, 2014. I wanted to amplify every voice missing from my life—the voices I grew up with in Houston, #BlackPoetsSpeakOut, the voices I did not see around us. I began to follow in the footsteps of powerful Twitter voices asking the hard questions and making incisive and brilliant critiques, from Mikki Kendall to Joey de Jesus to Hoa Nguyen to the Mongrel Coalition. I felt responsible for doing the labor exhausted folks could no longer do.
The power of Twitter is its ability to shorten the distance between people. An everyday person can @ a celebrity and get a response. But used politically, Twitter allows for democratized speech in such a way that the systemically silenced have a platform to begin asking questions directly of behemoth institutions, powerful individuals, and long-standing structures that oppress and uphold the systems of white supremacy that create dangerous environments for people of color and queer communities. No longer can a powerful figure publish a wack essay without substantive critique and direct questions from the Twitterverse, which will in turn improve the quality of essays coming out of major publications and increase visibility to marginalized voices. Big entities do listen to critique, it’s just up to us to be brave and start demanding change from the culture we produce, consume, allow into the human record.
And it’s working—major, positive changes have come from the growing chorus of activist voices on Twitter, demanding ethical, safer behavior from their communities, demanding that casual racism no longer be tolerated as art, demanding something as small as a visibility, something as specific as a Black woman to write #Lemonade criticism, something as urgent as conversations around Akai Gurley and Peter Liang. It’s a space where people of color can find each other, find allies, and band together, do something as seemingly insignificant as refining the rhetoric that will save them from a day-ruining microaggression at work. The “grand delusion is shifting,” and everyone’s invited. Let’s get to work.