I haven’t Twittered, partly because I have yet to read an interesting Tweet. (Perhaps I haven’t read enough of them.)

Twitter, it seems to me, comes into its own in natural disasters, terrorist outrages, revolutions and riots, where the message is of major significance and requires rapid dissemination, while both the form of the message and the sender of the message are irrelevant. The less of these, of course, the better.

However, Twitter does offer one interesting challenge. As a writer, I am interested in concision. Twitter demands concision.

There is a second, more personal attraction, too.

Over the past few years, I seem to have become a man without time. Or rather without ‘free time’. In other words, all of my waking hours are now devoted to childcare, housework or professional work: committed time.

This means that I have been unable to muck about with poetry, which is an idler’s activity … though also immensely valuable and precious to the idler in question.

Could Twitter help?

What if every Tweet was a haiku?

This is the challenge I hope to meet with my Twitter account: @andrewcjefford. It will be haiku only, and will rarely if ever concern wine. Like rain, it will be intermittent and sporadic.

There are difficulties. Twitter doesn’t allow you to create line breaks as you want, so you have to mark them in the running text (see below).

English, moreover, is an imperfect language in which to write haiku. So, I think, are all European languages: too much syllabic energy is wasted with articles and the like, and the natural accretion of the grammatical phrase.

Syllables, in any case, are not a true equivalent of the Japanese on.

A true haiku, too, is a juxtaposition of images or ideas positioned around the axis of a ‘cut’ or ‘cutting word’. Many of my haiku are not articulated in this way.

So the haiku you will find at @andrewcjefford are not true haiku. I cannot claim they are of major or even minor significance, either, and you may well consider that they would have been better undisseminated.

In fact what interests me is the chance for verbal distillation; the chance to disconcert and intrigue. I love that power in painting: just one image, always enigmatic to a greater or lesser extent.

I am not looking for ‘followers’ for them; they are principally a steam valve in an over-committed life; but if they bring anyone any pleasure of any sort (including peals of mocking laughter), then fine.

Here, in order to explain the difficulties of the medium, is the initial Tweet as it appears on Twitter:

The Mistral dropped away:/ leaves pause, still being./ Autumn has lost its breath.

I would prefer it written thus:

The Mistral dropped away:
leaves pause, still being.
Autumn has lost its breath.

I might shepherd a few together on this website from time to time, if not actively dissuaded.

[One of my favourite cartoons shows a dog just inside a gate. The gate says ‘Beware of the dog’. The dog is saying ‘Can I read you my poems?’ So feel free to dissuade me …]