My love of the Bard began at the University of Colorado, in the early 1980s. I was lucky enough to have Masterpiece Theatre showing several plays on PBS in the evenings, while I took an introductory course on He Who Should Be Named a Bajillion Times. So I got to see Derek Jacoby as Hamlet and Maggie Smith play Cordelia in Merchant of Venice, plus many other amazing performances.

And so I watched as well as read my way through Intro to Shakespeare. Our professor was a massive bardaholic, an ancient fella with a huge passion. His belief was that the only way to begin to understand a Shakespeare play was to read it seven times. So I did that with Romeo and Juliet, right in a row. The sacred 7.

Talk about word heaven. Don’t know about understanding, but I did get steeped in the sound. So much so that for two weeks I dreamt in iambic pentameter. My soul no longer had its seat in modern times, but was sucked by the sound back to times of yon. And anon and stuff.

Which brings us to the present. When I first joined Twitter I had the good fortune to find @IAM_SHAKESPEARE,  a guy who auto-tweets one line of Shakespeare every ten minutes on the dot, consecutively, all 120,000 of them. The entire godlike ouvre.

Twitter is so great. Readus Interruptus, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of earvision. Every ten minutes, without fail if you’re watching your timestream, you get a reminder of what the human race is capable of, such music, such humor, such terrible insight, the kind that gnaws at you and makes you wonder and go yeah. I had to get me some of that.

So I started tweeting back to Shakespeare, playing with his words. I would take a word or four (it has settled pretty much on three, as the personal mini-form has evolved) and snag it from William’s latest line then use it to start my own poetical plagiarism tweet.

As an example I’ll paste in my last, posted less than 5 seconds ago from web:

A deep indent you make in me, a place inside the mystery where you are. Once I was there but now are you. Am I blue? No freakin’ way. Yay!

Not my finest hour but a good example. I try to stuff as much rhyme into the piece as possible. 140 characters. Rhyme on. I don’t even mess with slants to differentiate lines. A waste of the form which follows from its short function. A perfect “twoem” ends with a period at 140 characters exactly. Sometimes I leave out punctuation to fit it all in.

That last one was from the line “It shall not wind with such a deep indent,” spoken by Hotspur in Henry V, in reference to a river. We just recently finished Hamlet, the most glorious collection of words ever slapped between a cover, by my lights. That was awesome. A little like dancing with the muse in person.

I find the quality of my quasi-verse often declines abruptly towards the end of the tweet, but that comes with the territory. No arguing with 140. And no diddling around forever. Part of the high-wire property of this format is the good chance I’ll write a real dog. Happens frequently, I’m afraid, but it’s the nature of this expression. Postmodern art and all, y’know. You have to make it suck occasionally to keep your hand in.

Here’s ten of my favorites from the past few months:

Again to lie with myself, I plump the pillow finely, sigh and rub my ass divinely. To sleep with me then, again. And so it goes, alone.

1598 was the year grandpaw exploded. Ate a whole pig. Done turned the house pink, insides anyway. Not much use for a blown-up gramps.

Tell my story, an thou will’t. Give your listeners a stilt to climb thy words, and a wrap against the wind, for these are chilling rhymes.

Will not wrong my simple song by singing it to you, nor shall I ever pen a poem to your beauty too, for my words are of love and you hear hate.

Madness is poor when madmen prove insane, and left their ticket to the normal train in their neighbor’s coat. The mad castle has no moat.

Very soft society, for it builds on rumor and mends by trends, a body of nothing but hot air long-exhaled. We are by our own rat, tailed.

Enter Hamlet and his duck: “Bad luck, mad quacker, I am no whacker of the dad, not bad like you, you ducky goose. O my feathery caboose!”

Wonder-wounded hearers gape away, for I have something strong to say and your ears must stand it. I can land it, I promise. Just let me try.

For no man is an I, land where he will, only I can be that. I am me, you cannot be, nor can I be your I too, for we are always I and you.

To my bow I bend my thought, see that recurved shape that wrought such hidden power, backwards-bending, thus with power arrow sending.

LWIII

…with thanks to @Guy_Vincent, who showed me how to look at a tweet as its own artistic format.