First, I just discovered that I love Mod Podge. I don't know what it is about it, but tearing paper and gluing it to something else is just a lot more exciting than it has any right to be. I covered a composition book this week with some pretty paper and a few of the magazine scraps I'd been saving for Giant Journaling (which, by the way, I haven't done for quite a long awhile. I think my goal for the new year will be to organize some art supplies into some usable system - and in the process acquire some more, like at least one complete set of markers and maybe some paints and paint brushes. But I digress.) In any case, it turned out very nicely, and since I am a journal hoarder, I had to find some really specific purpose so that I could start using it immediately, so I'm using it to start writing poetry again.
A couple of years ago, Treb sent me this book.
I was excited about it at the time, but I didn't realize just how amazing it was because I didn't yet comprehend the amazingness that is Stephen Fry.
Anyway, this book is all about writing poetry, and it's a nice refresher course on meter and form and all kinds of other things, which is nice, because the reason I stopped writing poetry was the same sort of reason that I haven't giant journaled for a long time - my tool kit is a little depleted and I'm creating crap instead of cool stuff.
Anyway, this book is all about writing poetry, and it's a nice refresher course on meter and form and all kinds of other things, which is nice, because the reason I stopped writing poetry was the same sort of reason that I haven't giant journaled for a long time - my tool kit is a little depleted and I'm creating crap instead of cool stuff. It's kind of fun. Stephen Fry is hilarious, and the book is conversationally entertaining. For some reason that makes the exercises more appealing, so I've been writing a lot of lines in iambic pentameter. I've started reading his stuff and writing before bed, which means I go to sleep thinking in iambic pentameter. I think that one of these nights it will give a funny lilt to my dreams. (No matter how naturally I read poetry when it's done, I always do an exaggerated mental lilt when I'm writing it to make sure I'm actually getting five feet and real iambs.)
I'm not very far into this, so I'm excited to move beyond that, but already my poetry is getting less icky, scattered and cheesy. It may still be notebook-worthy only, but at least I'll feel like I'm making something worthwhile instead of repeatedly creating collections of illogically-spaced sentences.
3 comments:
Glad to hear you're thinking about poetry. :)
Curse you and your iambs!
You know when you have a fever and you start to think about the same thing over and over again? The only thing that makes that worse is when you can't successfully complete an iteration without doing it in iambic pentameter!
(kidding about the curse, but not about the rest)
:)
I'd love to read some of your poetry when you feel it's blog worthy! :)
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