End of Week One of the Poem a Day Challenge
and I'm having the time of my life. Thanks to both readwritepoem and Poetic Asides for the great prompts.
Words in poems can be ambiguous, sometimes purposefully ambiguous. In my prose, I try to take great care to make my meaning clear, and I'll rework a phrase or substitute a word here and there until I'm sure that the reader will take away what I intend. In my poetry I sometimes expect my words to work over-time and provide several levels of meaning.
When I write prose, I use the computer almost exclusively. But I'm finding it's almost imperative in writing these poems that I stay away from the computer. The first Pocahontas was written on the computer and it became an amalgam of Googled gobbledygook instead of anything heartfelt. I'm better off if I work with pen and paper. And if I keep my notebook always at hand, then I'm confronted constantly with words and images that for me are the stuff of poetry. The conversation between a grocery clerk and the customer on line in front of me, the way my grandson turns 180 degrees in his sleep, the delicious gap between a friend's front teeth.
I'm also finding that someone else's poem can send me off into a new direction, and that my poem is almost a continuation of theirs, and then theirs in turn incorporates something from mine and we go on and on and on - a kind of parallel collaboration.
What's it like for you? Share, please.
Comments
Mine never go where they are
Mine never go where they are supposed to go. And that is true for all styles, with the exception of writing a card to a friend.
I was writing about losing my phone, and before I knew it, the duck in the muck and the birdie named tweety were flying off with it.
Sometimes I will walk with the poem all day, and I feel it pressing more and more and I won't write a word until it is ready to burn out.
Like you I always have a small notebook with me. I write on my walks with the dog, in the car on my way to work.
I use the computer for fiction almost always now, and most of the time with memoir, and creative non-fiction.
Kindness touches me most, but anything that open my heart will find a way somewhere in my writing.
I want to learn to be less descriptive and more sensory with my poetry.
I love taking a friend's word or sentence and use it in someway, it feels very playful to me.
We'll see where Gabriel goes next....
I also write down funny sentences I overhear customers say; children are the best inspiration.
Yesterday, I wrote down "Rocking like Dokken" because I just loved the way it sounded. I had no idea who or what a "Dokken" was. I do now and it will show up somewhere! A horse named Charlie, will certainly show up too.
C.
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