I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I love that it can keep me connected to friends and family who live far away. I could do without the games, the quizzes, the ads, etc. But something happened to Facebook over the weekend that has been utterly delightful: a poetry explosion.
I have my friend Stephen Kiernan (author of one of my favorite books of last year: The Curiosity) to thank for alerting me to this. His post explained it all: Post a poem as your status update and then assign a poet for everyone who likes your update. I liked Stephen’s update and he assigned me William Stafford. I posted as my status Stafford’s poem Allegiances. Many of my friends, and surprisingly, friends who I don’t normally think of poetry lovers (some would actually put me in that camp), liked my update.
So, I spent much of Sunday evening trying to match my friends with poets I thought they would like or already love. It’s been really great fun to see all this poetry on Facebook. I’ve made the mistake of liking other posts, so now I’m in an infinite loop of liking and posting poetry. As the number of people posting grows, this is will expand over a large group of very disparate people and more and more people will be reading multiple poems a day.
And honestly, this can only be a good thing and a needed break from people posting about the weather.