Twitter Poetry Night NZ last night

Yesterday I posted about Twitter Poetry Night NZ, which went ahead last night and was a success, with lots of participants. At least one person joined Twitter especially to be part of it, and at least one person (me) joined SoundCloud so they could record their poems. Thanks to Ashleigh Young for organising such a cool thing. 

I missed it live, as I was busy hosting a barbeque/reunion of friends, but I caught up with some of it later last night, and will listen to more tonight. If you missed it to, you can still follow its progress and listen to some of the wonderful poems people recorded. And just to make it even simpler to follow, Ashleigh has storified it here: http://storify.com/ashleigh_young/poetry-night-nz.

And I managed, with surprisingly little fuss, to record a couple of poems using a SoundCloud app on my phone sitting in my bedroom, which were included in Poetry Night:

• Anna's life, as directed by Michael Winterbottom: http://soundcloud.com/helen-rickerby/annas-life-as-directed-by
• Chris's life, as directed by Ken Russell: http://soundcloud.com/helen-rickerby/chriss-life-as-directed-by-ken

Poetry day/#exquisitecorpsepoem

Yesterday was Montana Poetry Day in NZ. Most of my participation was online - writing a poetry-related blog post for my day-job blog and twittering about poetry. Actually - there was a lot of poetry, or linking to poems, going on on Twitter. All the best cultural institutions were doing it, ie Te Papa, NZ on Screen, NZ Live, NZHistory.net, Te Ara.

I also had a bit of a bash at my own promotion of poetry last week. Inspired by @senjmito saying that Twitter was the new poetry, and a bunch of my friends having recently completed an exquisite corpse blog story (each person wrote 150 words, on their own blog, and weren't supposed to have read all the previous parts - there were 10 parts in all), I thought I'd have a go at starting an #exquistecorpsepoem on Twitter. It started nicely over night, but hasn't really chugged along since. If you wanted to join in, have a look at it here: #exquistecorpsepoem the actual lines lines are marked #L and then a number. I thought this was shaping up nicely. Am a bit sorry it didn't take off, but it was a fun experiment.

Wellington Sonnet Competition reading

From the Poetry Society:

Hi all. Please remember we have an extra meeting this month, to host the Wellington Writers' Walk Trust's Sonnet evening. Prizewinners in last year's contest will read their winning sonnets (the top prize was won by Michelle Amas, with a truly wonderful sonnet), and some of the Highly Commended entries will have an airing as well. A satisfying number of NZPS members were in the honours list.

There will be an open mic for anyone who entered the competition, as well as any other members of the audience who have a sonnet to share.

The venue is our regular meeting place, The Thistle Inn, at 3 Mulgrave St, Wellington (near the Railway Station), and the meeting will start at 7.30pm.

Also, if you're that way inclined, you might be interested to know that Poetry Society now Twitters: http://twitter.com/NZPS

What else I learned at Woodstock, and my new adventures (?) on Twitter

Following up from my previous post, you can read more about what I learned at Webstock on my day-job blog. Basically, it's about how I realised how important emotion and connection is for me on the web.

And to update that previous post - despite being way more interested in geotagging poetry, I haven't done that at all yet, but have joined Twitter. This is after not being very interested in it, and saying, in front of witnesses at about 5.15 pm last Tuesday, that I would never join Twitter. By around 2 pm the next day, I had joined. Sigh. What ever happened to my principles.

The reason I joined was mainly because we've started twittering (tweeting?) at work, and I wanted to be able to follow it to see how it goes. You can learn all kinds of exciting things by following us: http://twitter.com/Te_Ara.

Just now I tweeted my first poem - or rather a bit of a poem - you can't do much with 140 characters. It is a small bit from Eavan Boland's 'The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me': 'The past is an empty cafe terrace. / An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.' It's a poem I read today, and liked. Let's see how often I actually tweet poetry...

Also, I've put my photo back to normal, because section 92a of the Copyright Act thingy has been delayed.

Webstock and digital poetry stuff

I feel like if I had double the amount of time, I'd still always be busy. Sigh.

Last week, one of the things I was busy with was Webstock, which is an internet conference that runs in Wellington every year. It was my first year going, so that in itself was quite exciting for me.

The talks were varied, and some were useful in a work-related way, while others gave me some ideas and thoughts for non-work internet stuff. Still others were exciting in a philosophical sort of way.

Outside of this, I was given a couple of ideas about poetry things that I could do on the web, or that you could do on the web.

The first was suggested by a workmate - and possibly as a joke. He said I could geotag my poems. This is actually a cool idea. I don't really know how it works, but you can add things to googlemaps. People often tag photos to a particular place, but there is no reason you couldn't do a poetry layer, tagging poems to the geographic place they are about. I might actually do this one, because I have a poem about Frank Kitt's Park, that was in my first book, and a poem set in Orakei Korako, and possibly some others.

The other suggestion was from a friend, when I was muttering about how I don't really get Twitter. She suggested that I could twitter a bit of a poem every hour. I suggested every day, which seemed more reasonable. I can't see myself actually doing this one anytime soon, but if you want to, let me know. I might even sign up to Twitter to follow it.