My Pen [National Poetry Month]

My Pen

I write most things on my laptop or phone (using a bluetooth foldable keyboard). But I am always jotting notes to myself–and occasional poems–in longhand, with a pen. I have two favorite kinds. Today, I’m celebrating pens in my #wonderbreak. [Want to learn more or join in?]

 

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7 Responses

  1. Only have time to say I love this and your project, plus the way you display your words on your photo. Do you have a special APP for that? Curious. Love where ideas drink.…and displays the past! But all of it, really. Have missed a few Thursdays at 15WOL am going back for myself to write. Will be back.

    1. Thanks, Janet! I’m doing them all on PicsArt app on my Android phone. Plus using Clipper (another free app) and email to email the text of the poem to my phone, save it (and my copyright footer is already in there) to Clipper, making it easier to paste into my PicsArt pic. I use the Magic and Shape Mask and Text functions within PicsArt to put the whole thing together. Happy Poetry Month!

  2. Love this Laura! It’s feels good to read it aloud. Will share with students!

  3. “Where ideas drink.” Love that! I’ve been having a discussion with another poet about word choice and vowel sounds. Can you tell me if you worked specifically with the i sound or were you more concerned with meaning and form?

    1. Great ?, Margaret! I sent you a couple pics on Twitter. I’ve been writing these #wonderbreak poems in a little index card notebook. On the right side, I just brainstorm words, and then I draft the poem on the left. But this poem, I just ended up writing it on the right side. You can see my edits in the pic I sent you on Twitter. Stream of ink came to me first. I’ve mostly been trying to not do rhyming poems, but TO use plenty of near rhyme, internal rhyme, and such. I don’t know if it’s because I had written the Horse Chestnut poem not long before, but as soon as I pictured the pen as a stream of ink, the image of ideas coming to gather there like horses at a stream popped into my head. With the click, the tip, the slick round tube, I purposefully changed “light” (in the sense of weight) to “slick,” because it is slick and I liked the internal rhyme with click. I liked trail and tail and would have loved to have come up with an ending that sounded better and more concise and more like the rest of the poem. But I couldn’t (quickly, because I’m writing these fast) come up with an ending that sounded great, but that meant what I wanted to mean. So in those ending lines, I had to stick with meaning as my top priority. So at different times, I prioritized sound AND meaning. And that ink/drink was just a gift from the world. :>) Thanks for asking. It was fun to think about this. The other pic I sent is a more typical index card, for my fire poem, coming soon.

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