On March 14 at 3 p.m. at the Point Lounge in the Campus Center, the results were announced from University of Massachusetts Boston’s first Twitter Poetry Contest, which was run by individuals affiliated with the Creative Writing department. Over the past two months, writers maneuvered within the restrictions of Twitter’s 140 character limit, tweeting their poems to the handle @UMBWrites.
This contest was an extension of the “conceit of constraint,” which started with last semester’s Six Word Story Contest, said Director of the Creative Writing Concentration Nadia Nurhussein. Creative Writing MFAs, Peter Picetti, Ryan Vautour, Lauren Von Hagel, Karen Locascio, and Elysia Smith were the judges of the competition. Smith did much of its organizing.
Recently, The New York Times facilitated Twitter poetry, involving poets like Billy Collins and Elizabeth Alexander.
This was meant to be an exploration of “how productive the limitation can be and how it could lead to works that cannot be contained,” said Nurhussein.
The winning poem was tweeted by Abigail Poirier. It read, “We tinkers toil in trenches/Trenches built by my babas hands/Harvested hearts cry out wanting meaning/And the trenchers toil on,” with the “/’s” indicating line breaks. The prize awarded was $100 dollars.
There were two runner-ups, each winning $50. Amy Gaeta tweeted, “four pork chops, not for sale/Five of us is a crowd/each guard their own. Dad laughs, grinding his teeth/as we move/only our eyes.”
Keller McGuinness, an English major, tweeted, “Posed beside a blue motorcycle,/his arms around her shoulders,/eyes gazing confidently ahead./Smells of pine and gasoline. 1972”
McGuinness, said about his poem, “It stems from a picture I have of my mother and father, from before I was born. I didn’t have it in front of me, and so I was recalling it from memory and then trying to relay its particular sense and feel.”
McGuinness, who will be graduating this spring, said the challenges of the poem form were “sticking to the rather rigid guidelines, which made editing and revising the poem the real work.”
At the reading, Elysia Smith spoke behind the podium about a weekly Writer’s Community program that she runs. The Writer’s Community meets from 3-4 p.m. on Wednesdays and from 4-5 p.m. on Tuesdays in the English Commons on the 6th floor of Wheatley Hall.
All of the poems submitted to the contest can be viewed at www.twitter.com/UMBWrites.