Category: Personal

Shakespeare’s Language

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, the Folger Shakespeare Library is sending 18 original copies of the First Folio on a tour of the United States. First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare will exhibit the Folio in each of the 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico.

The Kansas City Public Library—my library—is the host for Shakespeare’s First Folio during its Missouri showing in June. We’ve planned a year’s worth of activities and programming around it.

So it’s pretty much all Shakespeare, all the time around here. Being a library, we like to emphasize the influence that Shakespeare’s writing had on the course of literature and language in the English-speaking world.

One fact that lots of people love to cite is that Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words and phrases in the English language. This fact tends to be presented as though he sat down and made them up out of whole cloth (a la Lewis Carroll).

I find this scenario unlikely. I consider it far more likely that Shakespeare was merely the first (or the first that we know of) to write down many words and phrases that were already being used in his era.

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National Poetry Writing Month 2016: A Summary

When I set out to participate in National Poetry Writing Month, I didn’t intend to write a poem every day. I just wanted to write two or three each week. I managed that, with quite a few more than two or three during the first full week of it. I hoped to end the month with anything between six and twelve new works. I did a bit better than that.

I confirmed that I do my best writing when I have external prompts to stimulate my creativity. However, I don’t always need to follow the prompts to take advantage of them—with my creative juices flowing, I’m more likely to write unprompted work, as well.

I attempted a wider variety of poetic styles and voices than I’ve done before, with varying levels of success. The challenge also gave me a chance to try a couple of new ideas I had for using modern technological devices to create poetry. I don’t know if this experience will get me to write more poetry overall, but I think it will improve my work when I do.

Now I have a year to decide if I want to do this again next April.

Here’s how my NaPoWriMo 2016 numbers break down:

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The Day I Left Home, Got in the Car, and Drove (NaPoWriMo 2016)

The day I left home, got in the car, and drove,
I swore I would never look back.
I broke this vow less than 10 miles down the road.
But my view out the rearview mirror
Was blocked by all my stuff, boxes and backpacks,
Piled in the back seat. My world shoved into my car,
Every nook and cranny filled. It wasn’t as much
As it looked like, filling up my little hatchback.
My world uprooted, taken on the road,
To find a new home, new soil in which to plant myself
And bloom. They say home is where the heart is.
They say you can’t appreciate home unless you leave it.
That you need to wander for a time, to see the world,
To learn who you are in a new place,
Before you can truly understand your roots.

Kenning Poem (NaPoWriMo 2016)

Today’s NaPoWriMo challenge is to write a “kenning” poem:

[T]hink of a single thing or person … and then write a poem that consists of kenning-like descriptions of that thing or person.

(Provided examples can be seen here and here.)

I love kennings! I love how playful they can be, and how they challenge you to conceptualize the world in a different, more essential, way.

There’s a sense from the way today’s challenge is described that a kenning poem should aspire to function as a riddle. I suck at riddles, though, so I’m confident the object I chose to describe is perfectly obvious to all. That’s OK—I’m proud of my description.

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The Void (NaPoWriMo 2016)

I’m losing steam. More accurately—I’m losing motivation and inspiration. I seem to be maxing out my capacity for writing poetry.

I’ve never tried to write this much in such a short period of time. My desire to write comes and goes. I’ve always thought I should be a writer but I’ve never been able to maintain the habit of writing for more than brief periods.

Nothing wrong with that, I don’t have to be a writer. But I committed to participating in NaPoWriMo and I’m unwilling to throw in the towel halfway through.

The prompts from the NaPoWriMo site for the first half of the month worked well for me. But these most recent few… Just not clicking. They’re not generating anything usable in my mind.

I need to write something if I want to keep going with this challenge. So, I turn to my usual strategy when I’m having difficulty making myself write—I write about not being able to write.

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Auto-Suggestion Poem #1 (NaPoWriMo 2016)

One of my favorite poetic exercises has always been found poetry, where you take a piece of prose text and attempt to transform it into poetry by adding line breaks and playing with spacing, etc. I love how this exercise highlights the importance of rhythm, scansion, and the layout of text in creating a poetic work.

(For arguably the best example of found poetry ever, check out Hart Seely’s collection, Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld.)

Lately, I’ve had it in my head to try a modern technology equivalent of found poetry:

Auto-suggestion poetry.

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Google Search Poem (NaPoWriMo 2016)

Author’s Note: This poem was supposed to post yesterday, April 12, but my blog somehow ate it.

Today’s prompt from the NaPoWriMo site is to write an index poem. I didn’t do that. Instead, I did what I think of as a modern technological equivalent:

A Google Search poem.

I chose several words, arranged them in the order I wanted, and entered them one-by-one into the Google search bar (technically, each search was the word followed by “is”). Google offered up between three and five auto-suggestions to complete each search. I limited myself to use a maximum of three of these suggestions per search term, in the order they appeared. Eh, voilà! A poem.

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The Office (NaPoWriMo 2016)

Today’s NaPoWriMo challenge is:

[T]o write a poem in which you closely describe an object or place, and then end with a much more abstract line that doesn’t seemingly have anything to do with that object or place, but which, of course, really does.

I’m not sure what I wrote for today is quite what they have in mind but it’s where the prompt took me.

I also want to make it clear: This poem does not describe my current workplace. It describes several previous places where I’ve worked.

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