Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Tweetspeak Poetry

A Year Away from Twitter / X

By 5 Comments

Twitter was the first social media platform I joined, way back in 2008. I was far from being an early adopter, but I was one of the first people at work to sign up.

Even that early, you could see the enormous potential for good and bad that a social media platform like Twitter could have. What we know as cancel culture developed early.

From 2008 to 2023, I had a consistent strategy in how I used the platform. I tweeted positive stuff. I didn’t engage in politics or controversies. I highlighted good things people were doing or writing. And I have to say I was steadfast from the beginning to the end.

At one point, Twitter changed its algorithm, and I discovered my account had been suspended, caught up in some automatic change (I wasn’t alone). But I had a friend who had a friend who knew someone who was a developer at Twitter, and within about two days, my account had been restored. The suspension had been a mistake by the design of a heavy-handed algorithmic change.

That was then. Elon Musk eventually bought Twitter and fired a whole bunch of people. If your account got suspended, you were going to have to deal with algorithmic bots, and a bot is never wrong. 

I was continuing on my merry way, when, on June 12 of last year, I discovered my account had been suspended. I appealed. Several times, in fact. The length of the reviews of my appeals could be measured in nanoseconds. My remaining option was to write a letter to Twitter / X headquarters in San Francisco.

And I said to myself, “No. I’m done. I am not going to waste my time on a letter that will likely be trashed before anyone reads it. I’m done with Twitter.” And I walked away.

I have not regretted my decision. Not at all. 

Here’s what has happened because of that.

I have more free time. Like up to 90 minutes a day.

The craziness that the platform has always embraced is gone, leading to a quieter life. 

I began to add links daily to my blog for interesting articles, stories, and poems that people might like to read.

My time on Facebook and Instagram has decreased as well. I haven’t increased my time on LinkedIn.

I’m writing more. I’m writing better. 

Substack has become a more important social platform for me. I don’t have a column or site on Substack, but I follow favorite authors, writers, photographers, and artists, and it’s all positive. Negative stuff can creep in, but I ignore it or unfollow the account. 

I also discovered that journalism is still being practiced in the United States, at least on Substack. 

I miss the people I regularly communicated with on Twitter, including a lot of poets. Tweetspeak Poetry, the site I write weekly for, was born on Twitter. We hosted numerous poetry slams with the use of Twitter hashtags, but that’s long in the past. You might say Tweetspeak outgrew Twitter, or it grew in a different direction (Tweetspeak is celebrating 15 years this year.)

Overall, the suspension of my Twitter account has been a good thing. I could have created a different account and started over, but I decided it wouldn’t be worth it. 

I got some of my life back, and I’m going to keep it.

Top photograph by David Paschke via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Poets of the Civil War,” edited by J.D. McClatchy

By Leave a Comment

If I asked you to give me the name of an American Civil War poet, you would likely say “Walt Whitman.” His poems, like “O Captain! My Captain!,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and “The Wound Dresser,” certainly catapult him to the top of the Civil War poets list.  

But if I were asked to name another Civil War poet, I’d be rather stumped. Until, that is, I laid eyes on Poets of the Civil War, edited by J.D. McClatchy, published in 2005 as part of the Library of America’s American Poets Project. And I was in for a major surprise. Whitman doesn’t stand there by himself.

The list of Civil War poets includes some of the best-known writers and poets of the 19th century. William Cullen Bryant. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. John Greenleaf Whittier. Herman Melville. James Russell Lowell. Bret Harte. Ambrose Bierce. Sidney Lanier. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: River Dixon and “Left Waiting”

By Leave a Comment

Time is our greatest asset, poet River Dixon writes in the introduction to his poetry collection Left Waiting: And Other Poems. It can be painful, unforgiving, and indifferent, he says. Squandering it can be devastating. “But time also gives us those moments when we can step back, put down the load we carry and recognize that there is something more at work here than what we can define. It’s these moments that we find another precious commodity: words.” 

Time and words are themes running through Left Waiting. There is a sense of time fading, like the dying rays of the sun and like what happens when as we age, and decades seem to pass increasingly faster. Where did the time go? How did the children grow up so quickly? I blinked and the four-year-old was graduating from college.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.