Digital Poems from NWP’s Write Across America

This summer, the National Writing Project hosted a series of virtual visits to Writing Project sites for writing events in its annual Write Across America project. I didn’t attend any of the virtual writing events, alas, but I did use the resources generated by each site to write and compose digital poems. I’ve shared them periodically, but I wanted to gather them in one post.

Nebraska

Georgia

Virginia

Connecticut

California

Arizona

I enjoyed the challenge of using places for inspiration, but I appreciated the resources gathered by NWP friends in each of those sites, as the breadth of images, stories, videos and other elements provided many inroads for writing.

Peace (Landscapes),
Kevin

 

Write Across America Poem: Canyon Dreams

I finally got to see the prompts from the last summer stop for the National Writing Project’s Write Across America, and the Central Arizona Writing Project focused on the Grand Canyon as its source for writing. Some other day, I am going to gather the digital poems I did this summer into one post.

Peace (and poems),
Kevin

Gathering Morning Poems

Unwound

With the start of school, I’ve been posting less here, but still writing small poems each morning. Here is a collection from the last week or so.

Pattern Sequencing

Kaleidoscope of Colors

Bellwether Forever

Invitation To Dance

Peace (and Poems),
Kevin

Poetry: A Riff Off The River

Slumber Along

A friend – Willeena – has been sharing some lovely poems on X, tagging it with the #writeout hashtag (she and I and others are part of the team planning Write Out 2023 in October). Her poems are situated in nature, and she has been adding short videos, too, of where she is getting her inspiration. A poem she wrote yesterday inspired this poem of mine.

She wrote, as part of her poem:

Help them move
past the mirk and mire …

— Willeena Booker
https://twitter.com/WilleenaB/status/1693989524442055138

I took that idea and wrote my way forward.

Summer rains stretch
fingers into the bottoms
of the riverbed,

a weathered troublemaker
stirring up what’s long been
settled in

With eyes closed, then,
we slumber along
through cloudy waters,
dreaming of currents
and clarity

Then stuck feet find
a footing, and a hand
reaches from the shore –

Once more, your presence
provides ballast
in an otherwise
unbalanced world

Peace (and poems),
Kevin

Word Art Poem: Every Word Matters

Word Art Poem

I’m not sure this experiment worked but I was trying to write a small poem, with words that could potentially be used in any order, and no matter the order, the words would still become a small poem.

The reason for doing this is that I was curious about using a Word Art generator that lets you hover over words, which then animates the word above the image. I imagine someone making new poems from the words of the source poem.

Try it out: https://wordart.com/1juwyfcldkj6/word-poem

Here is the original poem:

scrambled
tandem
word
poems
becoming
something
random

Peace (and word experiments),
Kevin

Blackout Poem: I Held The Book

Backout Poem: HP Lovecraft

This blackout poem was created as a morning assignment for the Daily Create. I don’t know much about HP Lovecraft (other than the name, and that his work was in the strange fantasy realm) but I found a collection of his poems (yep, strange stuff) and took a stanza into the Blackout Poem generator.

Peace (and the padding of unseen feet),
Kevin

Poetry: Circumference and Radius

Circumference and Radius

This is another morning poem from a one-word prompt — “radius” — which had me sitting in quiet for a stretch, scratching my head about how to even begin. And then it took shape, so to speak.

Peace (and Math),
Kevin