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Sports

Three Twitter Poems by Darren Rovell, Peter King, and Skip Bayless

Is there some secret poetry lurking in even the most mundane Sports Twitter feed? With the help of Poetweet, we discovered that the answer is "kind of."

It's greatly to Twitter's credit that no one has yet figured out a productive use for it. As useful as it is for tormenting Donald Trump and attempting to lure obtuse public figures into BOFA DEEZ NUTZ scenarios, it is also most useful in that way, which is another way of saying that it's not necessarily useful at all. It is a place to flush our puns and dispose of our surplus thoughts and spoonerisms, and that is valuable, but there is the question of what all those words are actually worth. Are they just millions of plastic bags clotting the virtual ocean? Or are they poems, each of them, waiting to be read as such?

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Ha, just kidding, it's the "millions of plastic bags" thing for sure. But the site Poetweet is doing its best to advance the idea that there's some poetry hidden in our Twitter feeds, and uses an algorithm (presumably) to mine old tweets, chop them into iambic pentameter, and turn them into poems. If you can handle soaking in your own fragmented mundanities, you should absolutely try it yourself. Or you can just enjoy these poems that we (and Poetweet) made using the feeds of some Sports Twitter luminaries. It turns out that there was always a poet inside Darren Rovell, Peter King, and Skip Bayless. Not great poets, necessarily, but this is Twitter we're talking about.

A Rondel by Darren Rovell

A Sonnet by Peter King

A Sonnet by Skip Bayless