Twitter and poetry

I find the more places I feed my writing into the more I try to think of things that fit into the arena I am feeding into. Take Twitter as an example. I have 2 twitter accounts: one for work and one for non-work tweets. I feed my personal twitter account into my livejournal and I know I have friends there that I am connected to. I also have to admit it is much easier to write a few tweets a day then it is to write one post in my livejournal. Whether any of the tweets mean anything as a daily feed - well I guess time will tell. One of my friends that I am connected to through my livejournal has begun to follow my my personal tweets.

Back to how Twitter has made me think about what I am writing - well I created a twitretry. I have to admit is is pretty bad compared to my other poetry. But writing a tweet that is a cross between it and poetry was a lot of fun. Maybe next time the twitretry will be a little, well more, um poetry like :-)

The term twitretry was coined by Neal Barber - thanks Neal

Where the idea began

I have to admit that the idea for a blog of poetry began with an idea someone else came up with: Barbara Flowers who contacted others about creating a place online for people to share the writing. As each writer created their own blog Barbara would all these blogs of writing to one central place - this central blog is now called the Writers' Blog, and began as the Queensland Writing Blog. There was also the possibility for meeting in person, but that never occurred and now I live in another country.

I have realised I have never thanked Barbara for starting me on this journey and I think it has been a very thankless task. That is bad on my part. Part of this post is to tell others about the Writers' Blog and suggest that if you are intending to start a blog of writing that this blog is worth looking into.

Thank you Barbara for helping me find a voice :-)

The challenge of Sonnets

I mentioned in a previous post how poetry challenges that a friend had given me. I went on to talk about the limerick challenge I gave myself and linked to one that I had written called The IRR within DR. I wrote this as a present for a friend and so the title can really only be understood by people who work in the sort of job I do. If someone really wants to know what it means ask :)

I also mentioned Sonnets though until now I have not posted either of the Sonnets I have written so far. They are both in the style of an English Sonnet and the one I posted on my blog of poetry is the 2nd sonnet I wrote and this is called Endure. I am still not sure if or when I will post the first as it needs other sonnets to go with it before it is complete.

I have found sonnets much easier to write than limericks: though I think this may because I over think limericks. This experience has reminded me how little I know about poetry and that I need to spend more time reading the work of other poets. However so many times I find myself looking at poetry that is nothing like what I write.

Poetry Challenges

A comment left by a friend was the first stage of the eventual 3 challenges that I would undertake. The first response I made was to outline the haiku challenge and I then posted next some of these haiku. Now to clarify something before someone comments that the haiku I have written are not actually traditional haiku: my response -- I was given a structure and style to follow and I believe based on that structure I have succeeded. As for traditional haiku, the main problem I have is that I do not understand Japanese. I see that as a challenge to give myself - learning to understand what is required of a haiku that is not written in Japanese.

The other two challenges brought about the poems titled Change and Swinging Moods. I found all three challenges a fantastic way to take my writing in directions that I had never thought to do so before. It has been a while since I have challenged myself as my friend sought to do so and the next challenge I gave myself was to write a sonnet. About 24 hours later I had completed my 1st sonnet. Is this perfect, well I did surprise myself and what I did write I have not posted as it is I believe one of a series of sonnets that only time will allow me to finish. The 2nd sonnet I have written may be posted when I am ready.

The other challenge I found myself putting my hand up for is a limerick. I have never found limericks easy to write. I believe my main issue is that I over think what I am writing.

After experiencing all these challenges I believe I will keep writing sonnets, not sure about limericks and beyond that I will just have to wait and see.

Feeds: sharing your blog through another site

Placing an RSS feed of your blog in other areas where you and others you know spend time online is a good way to make others aware of your blog. This can be done with many types of social networking sites that you may be currently using.

For instance, I spend a lot of time on Facebook and I wanted to be able to share my poetry that I post on my other blog To Write is to Dream with my friends, without expecting them to go to my blog all the time. I discovered that within Facebook there is an application called Notes, which you can post to and share with others your are connected to. Once you go into your Notes Settings you can import notes from an external blog. At this point add the RSS feed from your blog and save.

I know you can also create feeds that will appear in your Facebook Notes from other types of sites like a LiveJournal. However Facebook only allows you to add one blog feed to your account at a time. Once these notes begin to be imported someone within Facebook can add a comment to the post in Your Notes, though this comment will not then appear on your blog.

Delicious and external links

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet. (http://delicious.com/about -- accessed 14 August 2008)

I have created a behind dreaming delicious account for all the online resources I refer to in my blog Behind Dreaming. Other online resources that I also find useful in relation to both my blogs will be added to this account, even though I may not refer to them directly. The main benefit of creating a delicious account is so I do not need to clutter up either of my blogs with all the external resources I want to share.

If you want to be able to also create an external list of resources for your blog then you will need to go to the delicious site. If you do not already have an account at this point you will need to create one. Delicious provides code for what they call a Tag Roll that you can add to your blog. Once this code has been added the tags, for each resources that you have bookmarked in your account, will appear on your blog as a cloud tag. Each of these tags link a list of the resources that have been bookmarked with that tag within your delicious account. Just remember by selecting one of the tags you will be now be in delicious, so I have bookmarked Behind Dreaming in my delicious account and have given it the tag homepage so someone else can get back to my blog.

Let me know if you need instructions about how to actually add the code to your site.

What CC licences I have selected

Across this blog and my blog of poetry, I have chosen 2 types of Creative Commons licences. The second choice I made was whether I would apply a CC licence across the whole blog or on each post within a blog.

The blog Behind Dreaming is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License and has been applied across the whole blog.

While the blog To Write is to Dream... has a CC licence applied to each post within the blog. Some posts have had a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License and others Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

The choice of applying a licence on a single post instead of across a whole blog comes down to the fact that almost all of the posts within my blog To Write is to Dream... are poems that I have written. These poems are each works by themselves that I have chosen to make available through a blog. I started applying a single CC licence across my whole blog of poetry but ran into problems with a few poems where I want to know if someone else wants to remix them. One of these poems that made me glad that I have more than one option when it comes to CC licences is It is not fair.... This poem was difficult to write and I posted it on the blog because I did not want to hide it away any longer as I felt it was something I had to say, especially if it takes me a few more months until I am ready to work on it again.

The last issue for me is still really a question I have to find the answer to and it is around the area of a CC jurisdiction. I am Australian who is now living and working in New Zealand and I have no idea how long I will be in New Zealand for. I posted my 1st poem on my blog of poetry on August 3 2008. The chose I made was to apply an Australian CC licence on both my blogs. My question specifically is what jurisdiction should I apply to my blogs while I am living in New Zealand if I am Australian? I will see if I can find an answer to my question about jurisdiction and will post it here.

• To read about what Creative Commons is read my post Creative Commons: Share, Remix, Reuse - Legally or go directly to the Creative Commons site.

Creative Commons: Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally

Before I go into why I have chosen to use Creative Commons (CC) on both my blogs I thought I should explain what it actually is and where to find more information about CC licences.

Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work. This means as a creator I can define how what I create can be shared, remixed and reused legally by someone else. Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved." Most of the information within this blog post has been copied directly from http://creativecommons.org/ in accordance to the CC licence they have chosen: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I think any questions you have will be answered by going to the Creative Commons site and/or contacting those responsible for CC within your jurisdiction.

• To read about why I have chosen to use Creative Commons go to the post What CC licences I have selected.

Focusing a blog

When I began my blog To Write is to Dream I only wanted the blog to contain my poetry. My aim was to create a space where anyone could make their own mind up about each poem. This is another reason I rarely leave comments about the poems I post.

In the last month or so I ended up taking the extra information that on a few occasions I had added to a poem and pasting them as a comment. This means that it now appears like I have added some comments after the fact. Maybe down the track I will add a note to explain that the comment actually happened earlier (I will just have to wait and see).

As for other people's comments: when someone comments about the structure then I simply take a look and I make change if I agree with them. I believe the comment that someone has left will help others figure out the changes I have made. There has only been one occasion that a comment left me rethinking a whole poem. Initially this was titled Touch, which then became Touch (revised) and both are on my poetry blog. I am still not completely happy with the results so there may be a new revision sometime in the future. However, you will not find the comment on the blog as it was made in another location where I feed my poetry blog to. I will go into feeds in another post.

Why decide to focus my blog only on my poetry? Well I have noticed that blogs can end up being about many things and when that occurs they become hard to use. The added bonus to this sort of focus is when I added things like a cloud tag this only lists the keywords that describe the topics of each poetry. These keywords are a form of commentary, but are needed to allow a reader to pick and chose the topic of a poem they read.

The main thing I wanted to avoid is becoming a person who starts a blog and then lets lapse and I know many people who have done just that. The biggest bonus of this whole experience is the only writers block I have had in the nearly 2 years I have been working on To Write is to Dream is poetry blocks.

To Write is to Dream....

I have realised that it is almost 2 years since I created my 1st post on my main blog To Write is to Dream. My main blog is where I post many poems I write, which I want to share with my friends and family. By placing these poems in a public forum has meant I also need to think about when I am truly ready to share each poem with the world. Working on To Write is to Dream has been both a challenge as well as something I have never regretted doing.

So many times I have wanted to comment and go beyond the original intention of the main blog. The reason I have only commented a few times is because in the beginning I made a decision about what my blog of poetry would be. To go beyond that would only take away from why I created a blog of poetry. This decision was to leave it to you to decide what impact my poetry has left upon you. I never wanted to tell you what to think, I just hoped you would tell me what you think about what I have written.

Nearly 2 years after I began this journey I now know it is time to share with you why I started this journey, what I have learned and to look into what is yet to come.