Is this thing on?
I know this has been a rather quiet blog over the past year or so. I’ve been wanting to blog, but not just about fiber stuff. My creative work has been focused a lot on writing, and I wasn’t sure this was the venue. But I also don’t really want to have a new blog. I like this one. So, I’m just going to let it be my place to write about whatever I feel like.
It’s national poetry month. I am not a poet, but I live with one. Selma writes and performs poetry, and I love what she writes. She challenged me to write a poem a day with her. I’m such a beginner at poetry that it’s liberating, I don’t worry about being successful. I just get to play with words. We’re on day three. It’s great to have a writing partner here in the house with me. I think Selma may post her poems too at some point. Here’s a round-up of what I’ve done so far.
Day One — I discovered Google Poetics and wrote that day’s “poem” accordingly.
I also discovered Stitchomancy and played around with that, but didn’t come up with a poem to share.
The next day, Day 2, I played with blackout poetry–creating a poem by selecting words in a book and blacking out the remaining works. Christine Byl shared this technique in a poetry workshop I took from her in February.
Here’s the text of “Exit,” when you take it out of the book. Actually, that was fun too, because I got to play with the line breaks and punctuation.
Exit
Shut up and keep absolutely still.
Let it ring, frozen to the marrow
of my bones like the crack of doom.
Heels clicking, whispered hoarsely
In a mad rush, silent as memories
Rushed toward the second story.
At the first faint squeal
For the love, scarcely breathing.
Enough to arouse the dead.
Today is Day 3, and Selma challenged me to write a poem in the shape of something. She go the idea from a poetry prompt book we have. I’ll talk more about that another day. Here’s what I came up with. “Sky’s Excuse” is inspired by one of my favorite students.
Want to play too? Write a poem and post a link to it in the comments.
. It’s like an almanac of poetry prompts. Today’s prompt asks you to dig through your journal or notebooks for inspiration. So I trolled through the little moleskine in my backpack and grabbed phrases I liked. Can you tell that most of the notes in this notebook are from writing workshops I’ve taken lately?