Digital communities at work: Singapore Poetry Writing Month
This article outlines the development of the Singapore Poetry Writing Month (SingPoWriMo) digital community, organised around an annual month-long poem-a-day, prompt-based writing challenge carried out on Facebook. As a highly active digital writing community, SingPoWriMo has generated more poetry in English in its six-year history than the Singapore literary community has since independence. The poems posted on SingPoWriMo are able to reach the group’s population of more than 7,000 members without the traditional filters to publication such as editorial input, publisher selection, economic choice and transaction, and critical review. Conversely, social media provides selective replacements for some of these functions, via comment threads, ‘likes’ and other reactions, as well as Facebook’s viral sharing function that allows poetry to reach an audience beyond the group. These factors of mass reach, rapidity, immediacy, and instant feedback have implications for the poetry generated, which goes on to integrate and remake traditional modes of publication and performance according to the qualities of a digital community. This article seeks to examine the historical antecedents and influences of high-volume, high-speed poetic output; the nature of the poetry being written in these digital writing communities; and the effects and implications of the SingPoWriMo phenomenon on the Singaporean and regional literary ecosystems. SingPoWriMo and its counterparts are new ways of writing that also create, and demand, new ways of understanding writing.