And by the way, if for some reason you'd want to pass my poems off as your own, don't. Everybody knows they're mine.
New!
I tend to anthropomorphize things a lot. When an apple slice makes an unceremonious leap from the cutting table to the floor, I am wont to announce "I'm seeing the woooorld!" I enjoy assigning voices and personalities to the more deserving inanimate objects. So when I see interesting balloons on the freeway, poems like this happen.
Not New!
In Shakespeare class we were assigned to write a sonnet in ten minutes, with a small group of people (which makes it harder, not easier). My group of three didn't finish, but I'm not sure it mattered. At any rate, two of us went home and finished it on our own. This is what I ended up with. The best part of the whole thing is the phrase "crystal berry raindrops."
Looped freewrite from creative writing class. I'm not sure where the first line came from, but it's certainly interesting enough to make a poem out of. The last of the freewrites. Random rambling. Not much else to say about that. This is what we call "escaping the tyranny of the lefthand margin." Also "concrete poetry." Also, possibly, "fun." Filling the poetry journal while sitting in the sun. Happy. Filling the poetry journal while noticing a number of spiderwebs in the corners. Bored. Capturing the moment, which I would have spent inside the classroom finding a seat if someone hadn't closed the door all the way. Here's me whining about not wanting to fill the poetry journal. Ah, the things one can come up with when assigned to write as much poetry as possible. It doesn't have to be good; it just has to be. Thankfully there are plenty of things in the living room to write about. ...And here's some more. I don't know where that starfish came from; as far as I can remember, it's always been there. By this point, I was getting downright silly. There are a number of gourds and mini pumpkins on the railing by the stairs, which prompted this goofy bit of writing. Heheh. This is a weird one, I admit. I had the first line to make a poem out of; the rest just sorta followed. This one takes even more explaining. It's the result of a writing exercise in which we each had a few phrases to work into a poem. These phrases came from a previous exercise, in which we wrote about the magazine-clipping pictures we were given. The picture that prompted these particular phrases was of a guy on a motor scooter with boxes of pasta under one arm. You'll probably be able to pick out the phrases; they're the ones pivotal in making it weird. I'm not entirely sure where this came from. I was trying to find a good image to spark a poem, and found this along the way. It's odd and a little unexpected. A nice brief little thing. It seems kinda breathless, as if someone was gasping out a message while catching their breath after a race. Again, this came outta nowhere, with little rhyme or reason. I started with the first line. I've decided it's about an art character of mine; maybe the speaker is a character too. At any rate, it's not about or for a real person. w00t. Haiku. A bit of fun with the meaning of "meaning." ...And that's a fairly accurate summary of how I think about poetry.
This was a school assignment, in the "vocabulary poem" style (that's what I call it anyway). The teacher wrote a huge list of words on the board, and we had to use them all in a poem. Another vocab poem. It's amazing what you can come up with. And another. This one makes the least sense, I think. We had to go sit somewhere and write a poem about what we saw. I saw birds flying around in the rain. I forget what the assignment was for this one, but the result was kinda interesting. This is pretty similar to the last one. I think we had to write a poem using a certain number of question words (who, what, etc). A thought. Babble. I don't remember if this was a school assignment or not. It's a good description of my house on Thanksgiving. (In case you're wondering, I'm one of the kids). This was written specifically for the scrapbook we gave my grandparents on their 50th anniversary. Once upon a time, we were told to write a song in one of three styles: country, rap, or oldie. This is supposed to be country. Something I wrote when I didn't know what to write. A haiku I wrote to enter in a contest. The prompt photo was a woman standing on a rock by the sea with a wave crashing in front of her. Another haiku for the same contest [actually it was a contest exactly like the first one, held the next day]. The prompt photo was a walrus climbing onto a rock. Haikus confuse me. At school we took a field trip around town. I'm not sure why I wrote a poem about it, but I did. It was probably another assignment.
My history teacher assigns everyone "templates", a form of homework that is dreaded in varying degrees throughout the school. I think somebody put this poem in the yearbook.
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