Are your Twitter skills poetic? Prove it, at the library’s National Poetry Contest

Poetry is probably the least respected of the language arts, at least in a financial sense. Are there even any professional poets out there? Well yes, obviously, but the fact that we can ask that in jest indicates at least a little bit that poetry, while beautiful belongs to a different age. One where people didn’t have the word “lulz” for starters. But the New York Public Library is trying to drag poetry into the digital age, and their method, while kind of questionable could actually work. And that’s how we end up with the National Poetry Contest on Twitter.

The rules are pretty simple: after you’ve registered, you send three poetic tweets to @NYPL. Two of the tweets can be on any subject you like, but the third has to deal with the subject of libraries, books, reading or the city of New York. And don’t just crib lines from the opening scene of Manhattan for a New York poem, the judges are almost certainly familiar with it. What do you win if you manage to make your 140 characters that memorable? First off, you get a free set of poetry books. Even more important (arguably) than that, is that the library will share your tweets with their more than one million social media followers during National Poetry Month in April. Helloooo increased Klout score!

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