I shouldn’t admit this, but my introduction to tweeting was the eighteen-day Egyptian revolution. Of course, I’d heard of Twitter, but had dismissed it as of no interest to me. Yet, as with so many of my disdainful preconceptions, experience forced me to change my view.

As I surfed TV channels and internet news sites nearly hourly during those eighteen days, I noticed that all the newscasters were at some point reading tweets from Egyptians in Tahrir Square.

Naturally, I was gripped by the content of the tweets. But what gradually struck me as well was their form. I started hearing them as a sort of haiku: that 140-character limit imposing restrictions that compelled tweeters into some marvelous condensations.

“Friday of Anger, under tear gas and rubber bullets. A day I will never forget.”

There’s a rhythm here; the tweet scans mostly in dactyls. And a three-part sequence of images and then subjective response:

Friday of Anger
under tear gas and rubber bullets.
A day I will never forget.

This is poetry. In a different way, so is this:

“I still believe mubarak is pulling the strings from his hideout. slowly giving concessions so people leave streets”

The rhythm moves the lines along, as we hear the tweeter’s worried concern coming through. To bring out the poetry of this tweet, I think I’d play with the line-breaks to leave an ambiguity hanging about the speaker’s “belief” in Mubarak:

I still believe mubarak
is pulling the strings from his hideout. slowly
giving concessions so people
leave streets

After the Egyptian revolution declared victory with Mubarak’s resignation, a tweeter gave this evocative sense of the scene:

“Strange to see traffic flow smoothly by the museum, a former battle zone.”

A whole poem cycle of a sort was created by the tweets of Wael Ghonim, the thirty-year old Google marketing executive whose Facebook page helped launch the Egyptian revolution and who was imprisoned by Egyptian authorities for ten days during the uprising.

Here is a selection of his tweets after his February 7th release. Each is a nugget of imagery.

“I feel that their last line is being written, and soon we’re taking the pen to start drawing our own future.” (2-9-11)

“It started to rain in Cairo, and I am optimistic. Hoping that sky is crying from happiness.” (2-10-11)

And after the revolution brought an end to Mubarak’s rule:

“Good morning, Egypt. I truly missed you in the past 30 years!” (2-12-11)

“My message to the dictators of the world: You should at least freak out. Block Facebook and cancel Fridays.” (2-14-11)

“We cried a lot. Not because we are weak, we cried because we are human beings. Our tears were the bullets that killed 30 years of injustice.” (2-15-11)

None of the tweets I’ve quoted in this post were intended as poetry. There is, however, a whole sub-genre of tweets that are quotes from poems or Scripture or Pascal-like pensées on a range of topics.

But these don’t, for me, have the poetic freshness of the made-on-the-run tweets from the streets these tumultuous days. Since Egypt, tweeters from Algeria, Iran, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya (and who knows where else by the time this post appears) have been turning out their creative communiqués nonstop.

Some do intentionally play with language. Here’s a fun merging of “tsunami” and Tunisia, the country where the current rash of popular revolts began:

“The Tunisami washes on. #Egypt, now #Yemen, #Bahrain, #Iran. So many revolutions, so little time.” (2-14-11)

I once co-authored a book about the creativity of the popular mind as manifested in idiomatic expressions. Now I see Twitter as a comparable manifestation. I’m not claiming this for the majority of tweets, which seem to be announcements or ads or links to websites or bits of a conversation on some non-urgent topic.

But in the revolution-making tweets there’s an energy that can bubble up in images and word-play, an instinctive creative response to the 140-character limit. Like this playful bow to Twitter itself:

“Twitter: Its climbin’ in yo windows, snatchin’ yo dictators up.” (2-14-11)