all of my most sacred and intimate writings

disclosure: sharing my writing is scary and something i held onto for a very long time. please read with kind eyes! letting go is part of the exercise!

poems

poetry is not just about reaching a broad statement about life. poetry becomes an aesthetic experience only insofar as objects are made unfamiliar within art and we can enter and experience the process of percpetion. poetry refreshes our understandings of language and the world. poetry reacquaints us with our senses: tasting something again for the first time, how it feels to walk through nature, or even the joy and excitement of obtaining a piece of clothing that is now forgotten as we wear it out. poetry reminds us. poetry strangifies common human experiences. poetry is beautiful! poetry is power! poetry is art!

semantic satiation

when i swim...

word sounds

hills covered in snow

tri-cube poem

you are so full of everything

wear that body down

haiku

the dusty vinyl spins

how to escape the scythe

the enemy in your own home

silence

so i can tell you

i could never forget

a constellation of experience shared

prompts

below, you will see some prompts that i have collected to get the thinking flowing and the creative juices, juicing. some are maybe original? some are passed on from poetry classes? regardless, i hope these prompts can inspire you to create! if you do use one of these prompts, and are open to sharing your writing, i would love to see what you create.

• 3 stanzas of 3 lines, with each line being 3 syllables (see: tri-cube poem above)
• take a word you find interesting and use it like a touchstone (see: semantic satiation above, hinging on the word spelunking)
• start with a phrase (like, when i *insert verb*...) and play with associations that follow (see: when i swim... above)
• take a word that you like the sound of and try to discover a word or phrase in it. be willing to go for some nonsense (see: word sounds above)

jumping points

• start with thinking about the machinery of words. what makes words so fun?
• compound words with hidden fun
• how it feels to say the words, mouth feel
• drawing out vowel sounds
• some fun words to inspire: burlap, voodoo, alloy, rain, voices, spelunk, keepsake, echo, spikey, moth, adazzle, dawdle, flickers, bald, foxglove, raspy, thrashing, magic, foxglove, delphinium, nasturtium, hunching, munching, punching, loon, velvet, uncertain

values

• abstraction, taking the world to another world
• humor, sometimes it seems so coveted to write
• existentialism, being human, complexity
• flowery, sometimes dramatic language to describe something simple, showing and not telling
• mundanity, the little things of life
• directness, sometimes it is also easier to be told directly
• flow, rhythm, rhyme
• new perspectives, finding ways to describe the unknown or unaddressed
• honesty and value, authenticity
• bridging connections, somes out of one's life but appeals to a broader audience
• intentional structuring
• surprises in content or style, in fluency, certain words