April Poetry Challenge

I am enjoying the Poetry Challenge again this year. It's great to develop the discipline of working on a new idea each day, even if I sometimes have to post them later. I am also enjoying the companionship of several other writers in the challenge.

You can find the prompts at Poetic Asides, and you can enjoy the poems that are posted by clicking on the comments link under each prompt.

You can read poems from our group or post your own on our new Pens & Pages Poems .

Here is one I wrote about writing, and what has been written:


Silence Overflowing

Papers bound together with a wire
waiting for ink to give them meaning.
Pens are river channels of the mind
leaving marks in layer after layer,
like fossils caught in leaves of slate.

Walls overflow with ideas
sandwiched inside cloth and boards--
fibers smeared with ink.
Little bits of other's lives
touch my mind across the gaps of miles and time.

I speak with silent marks on empty pages,
and listen to pages full of marks that make no sound.



There is one more week to National Poetry Month. Plenty of time to jump in and write a poem if you haven't already.

Freewriting Exercise

During our latest Tuesday meeting we had fun doing a free-writing exercise from Creative Writing by Kathryn Lindskoog. We took some small pieces of paper and each of us wrote an abstract word on one paper and the name of an object on the other. Then we mixed up each pile of papers and drew one slip from each. Then we were to tell how the two were alike. We enjoyed it so much, we decided to publish! Here they are in their mostly unedited forms:

Humor-------Bird

Birds with humor tease the squirrels in my trees. Of course this thought presumes that birds are like humans and capable of thought. Humor exists in creation in like manner as birds do. It takes flight in the mind of the observer or communicate and lands where it is safe in the minds of joyful people and singing birds. The humor of the world is wrapped up in bird songs-making fun of us with their sounds.

mcj

A Toenail is Like Honesty

A toenail is always just what it is, so it is "honest".
One can paint it, cover it up, or hide it, but it will still be a toenail. Therefore, a toenail is like honesty.

Nana

Lemons & Depression

Not the bright elegant yellow of a lemon, but the sour taste of the inside of the lemon.

Is this how we present ourselves .... happy, sunny on the outside, but depressed, sour, introverted on the inside?

Depression will eventually turn a person's sunny side sour if it is allowed to take over our thoughts, our very being.

Grannie Carol

Kleenex & Intrigue

Kleenex is like intrigue because it is made up of layers, tissue thin, which build upon each other to become opaque. At least the good kind of kleenex. I guess cheap kleenex is like a failed attempt at intrigue - it tears and you can see right through it.

MadeByAmanda

Sculpture & Humor

Humor is molded like an artist molds clay. the artist presses and shapes until he gets the effect he wants. In the same way people play with words and ideas, pushing them and shaping them to have a specific effect.

Humor is like a sculpture that was chopped apart and put back together carelessly or absurdly. The sculpture had one message and was morphed into a different message.

DJ

Faith and Hat

A hat covers your head, keeps you warm, protects your vulnerability to the elements. I've heard a hat on your head is more effective than a coat in keeping core body heat in.

Like faith, which seems so small and insignificant, yet the Bible says that if it's like a mustard seed, you can move mountains. Faith, like the humble hat covers you more effectively than any single component in your belief system. It protects you from the spiritual elements that seek to "lower the core temp" of your soul.

Solard

Hey, Y'all!

DJ had a great idea and although it may have been collaborative in nature she presented it to us on Tuesday's library meeting. The idea was to have a weekly post for this blog, with each member of PnP signing on to take a week. If we all participate, we'll only have to do it about once every 8 weeks or so.

This is my week ;0)

As most of you know, after I mentioned that I'd suffered from writer's block in college and feared it happening again, madebyamanda suggested a book to me, Page after Page by Heather Sellers. At our last Monday meeting, I mentioned that the book was giving me fits because the exercises are so many and so... intense. The book is an Interlibrary Loan, and I'd already extended that IL twice so it was becoming a problem! But I vowed to make it through the book. At about Exercise 17 or 18, the "compost" (Ms. Sellers describes this in the book) really started to cook and I realized -- much to my own surprise -- that I was really doing some productive work following the exercises in this little book!

I think it's a book that a lot of y'all might like to read... and struggle through (!) as well. So, when I was up in Amarillo the other day, I ordered it from the Barnes and Noble! I want to retain ownership of it, but I will lend it out with a full heart to as many of you as wish to try to conquer it's summit! It's a tough little hardback, so it should withstand whatever we can collectively dish out. Hee.

Anyway, Ms. Sellers has some powerful exercises in the book and she backs it up with a rich and varied background-- not always pleasant. The woman has had her share of bumps in the road! But I feel it's been wholly a great experience going through the book, working the exercises -- even if I started the writing with an angry disclaimer as the first sentence: "WHAT is the POINT of this EXerCISE!!!" heh.

Hopefully, the book will be in my possession in a week or so -- and I will hand back the IL copy to Bren, finish the exercises in my newly purchased book, then offer it up to whomever wishes to try it out next.

The book will get you writing. I promise.