This poem was sparked by a one-word prompt (rider) this morning. I did some slight editing through the day.
Peace (and gravel),
Kevin
I have signed up for the Google Workshop Labs because I am curious about how Google will be weaving its Artificial Intelligence tools into platforms like Google Docs, Slides, Sheets and more.
I noticed that the image generator tool appeared in my Slides the other day, so I took a poem from yesterday’s morning writing (via a one-word prompt off Mastodon – “specimen”) and tried it out with the five-line poem. I set “sketch” as style of art and then used lines of the poem as the text for image generation.
The slideshow poem is embedded above or you can view it full screen here.
I’m still not sure what to think of the visual results, but the tool is certainly handy, in one sense, and easily accessible, as it is located right in the Insert Image toolbar.
Peace (in pencil),
Kevin
I am a morning poet, writing small poems to start the day. There’s long been something about the concision of words and trying to create a scene out of a verse or two, or a haiku, that appeals to me. I’m not suggesting all of my poems are great or insightful or anything but every now and then … you know?
Little Poems — a collection of 300 or so small poems gathered by editor Michael Hennessy — is full of these little writings. There are dozens and dozens and dozens in here, so much so that when I was checking the book out of the library, the librarian opened it to the Table of Contents out of curiosity and began to cite the many poets in here, as I stood there, nodding in agreement.
From early poems by Sappho (Seventh Century BCE) to modern poets (Ocean Vuong, still writing wonderful poems), the gathering of verse here stretches over time and content, and style. All the poems here are under 14 lines. Some are magnificent. Some are mundane. Some are intriguing. Some, confusing.
Most of us experience literature for the first time in the form of a ‘little poem.’ Long before we’ve tasted our first solid food, we’ve heard a soothing lullaby spoken or sung by a parent, and before we start school, we have already begun to accumulate a storehouse of nursery rhymes. The sounds and rhythms of those little poems are embedded in memory, and we pass them down to the next generation. – Michael Hennessy, editor, Little Poems, page 17
I found myself slowing down to the handful of shape poems here — a form that interests me, particularly in light of how some digital tools might be used by poets to enhance a poem — and found the poems to be delightful in their visual nature, the way a writer imagines words as design.
Here is an audio interview with Hennessy about Little Poems via MixCloud.
Peace (and poems),
Kevin
This week’s stop for the National Writing Project’s Write Across America was at the South Coast Writing Project at UC Santa Barbara (California) and the theme was social justice.
I chose an image by photographer Mary Ellen Mark called The Damm Family In Their Car, which was a powerful visual of a family on the edge, and the description with the image mentioned the family’s dog, too, and that dog — Runtley – became the focus of my poem.
(Note: Copyright protections means I could not use the actual image and the dog image here was generated by Adobe Firefly)
Peace (and Support),
Kevin
I am always intrigued to try new ways to write poems, so when someone at the NWPStudio space mentioned the form of a paper Cootie Catcher/Origami Fortune Teller to write and share a poem (and gave this one by Leila Chatti as an example), I thought: hmmm.
How would one do that?
Well, after some digging around, I found a helpful website dedicated to Cootie Catchers (gotta love the Web in all of its specific weirdness!) that not only had samples of setting up these childhood games in different themes and content, but also, there was a template you could use to edit with text and image and then download and then fold, and then play.
I wrote an 8 line poem (each line below a number in the paper catcher) and began inviting folks to give me a sequence of numbers from 1-8, and I would use the paper PoemCatcher to share out lines of the poem. Ideally, each sequence creates a new poem (although each of the 8 lines remains the same).
If you want to play, just leave me a comment with a selection of numbers, and I will respond with your poem.
Peace (Paper and Poems),
Kevin