How to convey newlines in tweeted poetry, if at all?
Suppose I've written a haiku as 3 consecutive lines with standard punctuation as if it was normal free text, which means I don't use special punctuation at the end of a line just because it's the end of a line but only if normal language rules demand/allow punctuation. Now haikus in their concise nature seem well-suited to be published over Twitter (or your favourite alternative short message format), yet Twitter doesn't seem to support newlines very well while I think much of the beauty of a haiku might as well come from its 3-line structure.
Being rather unexperienced with Twitter and writing poetry, though, I wonder if there is some commonly accepted way to at least convey the notion of "virtual" newlines in a continuous text in some other way, e.g. through the use of punctuation, say a hyphen or slash or whatever. Or maybe this is rather bad advice in general? Even if this is likely not an entirely strict rule there might be commonly accepted approaches to this or at least insights from more experienced writers in how to tackle this problem, if at all. Maybe this problem should just be ignored in favour of a better text-flow.
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As Jay already said, the common convention to signify newlines inline are slashes.
On the other hand, if you use Twitter as a publishing medium, it is my opinion that you should develop a poetic form that is native to that channel. There are narrative formats in books (novels), film, comics, radio plays and so on, and there are lyrical forms in books (poetry), film, comics and so on. The "poetic" films, comics, radio plays etc. don't have newlines, because they use the specific "language" of their medium to achieve what poetry achieves with printed words and whitespace.
So, if you plan to use Twitter as a regular publication channel and not only this once, instead of how to represent poetry on Twitter, your question should ask how to write poetry for Twitter.
If you hold down the Shift key and press Enter it adds a line break. Apparently it won't work in some clients, but I just tried it on a tweet and it seems to work.
In general, to convey poetic line breaks in "continuous text", replace the line break with a slash. "I've never seen a purple cow./I never hope to see one./But I can tell you anyhow,/I'd rather see than be one."
I don't use Twitter so I can't say if this convention is commonly used there, but it's the normal convention in other contexts.
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