Tag Archives: poem about writing poetry

“Words” for W3 65

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Words

By their adjustment,
I change their drift,
but when I alter their lilt,
I am as transformed by them
as they are by me.

I am inebriated by words.
I reel in their power
as they call my bluff.

They reflect the changes in me
I would otherwise not know.
I can float in their buoyant comfort
or shoot the rapids of emotion.

Words are my river and my raft,
my cushion and that daredevil conveyance
into a new stream of thought

from which I never return
to the exact same world
I left from.

 

Why Do We Write?

We write to share that part of us that might not otherwise be shared. The page is like a Fibber Magee and Molly closet where we store all those leftover parts of ourselves. Open the page and everything comes spilling out: organized, disorganized, jovial, sad, rational or irrational. Everything gets crammed into the page. We may not be lionized for it. Our words may be stolen and presented as someone else’s, but the important thing is to write them. Words are like a pressure valve, freeing pent-up emotions. They furnish a release that is somehow part of the solution to the problems they describe. 

For the W3 65 Prompt: Inspiration  (What inspires you to write poetry?) To read other poems written for this prompt, go HERE.

Credo

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Credo

It’s the opposite of sinecure, this writing of a blog,
but it’s my distinctive effort and my chosen cog
infrangible and constant in the spinning wheel of life,
it is my way to join the world with minimum pain and strife.

There may be repercussions, for you may not agree.
You may not shelter thoughts that coincide with me.
For sure, great fame and fortune are not slated to be mine,
but spending hours a day at this seems to suit me fine!!!!


That’s Ollie and Roo, a few years ago. They thought I didn’t know they were hanging out back there until I pulled the computer screen down to see why it was shaking back and forth as they wrestled.

This time I did something different and wrote a line in sequence for each prompt word before seeing any of the other prompt words. It is a fun game. I challenge you to do the same and link to this blog. The best way to do this is to favorite the six websites below. They all give daily words and you can click on the site, establish the link, write the line and go on to the next. It’s easier than you think once you establish the favorites. Or, just use the words below but look at one at a time and write your line before looking at the next. With my memory, it is easy. I could write down all six and look at the first and immediately forget the others if I don’t concentrate on them.

Prompts for the day are sinecure, distinctive, infrangible, repercussion, shelter and fame.

Pieces of Toast

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Pieces of Toast

They dip into
the smooth
round yolk
of a fading dream.

They interfere,
these conscious words,
an uninvited jentacular
mob that enters

without invitation,
shedding their crumbs.
I make exception
and surrender
control,

accepting
their sharp crisp corners
into the broken centers
of my smooth round
subterranean
stanzas.

For NaPoWriMo 2029, Day 29 the prompt is to write about food personified. Piece of toast!!!
And, coincidentally, for RDP, whose prompt today is food!
Photo downloaded from Unsplash

Found (For NaPoWriMo 2023 Day 4)

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The prompt today was to write a triolet. A triolet is an eight-line poem. All the lines are in iambic tetrameter (for a total of eight syllables per line), and the first, fourth, and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines. This means that the poem begins and ends with the same couplet. Beyond this, there is a tight rhyme scheme (helped along by the repetition of lines) ABaAabAB. Actually, there was a triolet challenge that I wrote for twice before for NaPoWriMo, once exactly ten years ago in 2013, the first year I did NaPoWriMo, and again in 2020. The poems as well as the cats  I  eventually “found”  back then are below:

A Poem a Minute with a Triolet In it

When first I tried to write this rhyme
I could not seem to make it scan.
In short, I felt less than sublime
when first I tried to write this rhyme;
but then I took the proper time
and proved the truth as other than:
“When first I tried to write this rhyme
I could not seem to make it scan.”

 

With Workmen Here

The cats have flown, I know not where.
They’ve chosen to remain aloof.
They don’t await me on the stair.
The cats have flown, I know not where.
Not one to steal my favorite chair.
I do not hear them on the roof.
The cats have flown, I know not where.
They’ve chosen to remain aloof.

 

The assignment for day four of NaPoWriMo 2023 is to write a triolet.

Poetic Quandaries

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Poetic Quandaries

Prompts can be unpredictable. Of that you can be sure—
if not impossible to use, then probably obscure.
It’s hard not to exaggerate when words are such a stretch.
Hard not to bitch about them. Hard not to whine and kvetch.

We march in lock step in these blogs, so penitent we’re not.
It is the prompters who weave tangled nets in which we’re caught. 
It’s hard for us to devise plans that make use of each word
and add alliteration? Folks it is absurd!!!!

Frost never had such rules to follow–and such provocations.
No such tribulations and no such vacillations.
No trying to put up with a prompt that was absurd,
but on the other hand, he had to think up every word.

Prompts are unpredictable (You can say that again–ha!!!), plan, penitent, march, exaggerate and alliteration.

For another poem for today’s alliteration prompt, go HERE!!!

Simple Inspiration

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Simple Inspiration

I’ll verify a dozen ways that  I’m in the pink,
but I’m not as together as some folks may think.
The course I plod is littered by words I’ve thrown away,
hoping that I’ll come across some better ones some day.

I use no means nefarious to prod words into being.
My syllabic yield is rather based on what I’m seeing.
And so I am a plagiarist of wind and rain and flowers,
recording what is sweet in life and also much that sours.

 

 

Prompt words today are nefarious, yield, course, verify, dozen and pink.

Plethora

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Plethora

If I had any gumption, I’d attack that backlog of
poems that I have written about life and death and love.
Fantastic in their numbers, those poems exist in piles,
bound in three-ring binders and squeezed into hanging files.

Thy cluster in my consciousness, swim nightly through each dream.
They are both strength and weakness as they stretch out, ream on ream.
They allow me no real leisure, for they’re everywhere I look,
begging for confinement in a magazine or book.
They crave to be collected between front and back cover,
but in spite of resolutions, I  simply write another.

This poem and these photos are  no exaggeration. I have 13 file cabinet drawers plus one big bin and a few piles, binders and stacks that contain poems and stories I’ve run off, or ideas for new ones.  I have no idea now many poems I have in my blog and computer that I’ve never run off. 

Prompt words today are fantastic, weakness, backlog, gumption, allow and cluster.

Morning Cuppas

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Cup of Java?
Cuppa Tea?

Cups of Java or Cups of Tea? Me, I just need my:

Morning Couplets

Every single day for years, my morning’s not replete
until my poem is published—polished and complete.

I meander through my sentences until I think they’re done,
and then I herd them into shape—each metaphor and pun.

My need is pathological to get them all just right.
I love words’ sensuality, their pathos and their bite.

Though some have a reluctance to show up when I call them,
there’s a satisfaction when I finally recall them.

What would I do with mornings if I had no words to play with?
There’d be nothing else for me to find to fill my day with!

Prompts for today are meander, sentence, pathological, replete, reluctance.

Found Poetry for NaPoWriMo 2022, Day 30

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The prompt for the 30th day of NaPoWriMo 2022 was to write a cento–a poem made up from the lines of other poets. In my poem above, the lines are numbered. The sources are given below:

I listed Hilda Morley as a 4 in two places  in my poem because although both lines were from the same poem,  they were not sequential, but were in different parts of  her poem.

Forgotten Words

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Forgotten Words

Sometimes a certain word just doesn’t clink.
It doesn’t fit in in the place where we think.
It’s not in our lexicon. We can’t remember.
Not only won’t spark. There’s not even an ember
of inspiration to trigger a thought.
We only remember what it is not.

What could be therapeutic at bringing it in
from where it’s been ostracized. What about gin?
A good stiff martini might loosen our brain
and help us remember what it means again.

It hangs somewhere in back like a not-much-worn pendant,
covered up by more popular, less independent
words more ubiquitous, used every day.
More popular, funny and modern and gay.

But somewhere in the shadows, in the back of our mind
are words we’ve forgotten of the long-ago kind,
ready to pop out in most unlikely times
when we’ll use them in novels and stories and rhymes.

Then they’ll shake out their wrinkles and rub off their rust
And rejoin the world, leaving footprints of dust
in the minds of all readers, who for sure when they read them
will use them again when they happen to need them.

Prompts today are clink, lexicon,  ostracize, independent and  therapeutic,