Day 16 & Happy Easter!

Day sixteen – I’m always sad on the sixteenths of April and November. It means the countdown has started to the end.

However, the fun’s not over yet! Yesterday I found an article

Romanced Sugar magnet poem — Magnetic poetry Romanced Sugar by Ariel

with links to 11 different apps that allow you to play around with poetry. I hope to play with a few of them today – especially the magnetic poetry apps. I have quite a few poems that started out that way. Well – not as apps – but actually magnets; I have a metal bed tray that I paired with a heart shape box of three magnetic poetry sets.

It is fun to play withwhen I am being lazing in bed. It’s a fun way to end the night or start a morning. Oft times, I let a poem simmer here and I rearrange the tiles during the day.

And I admit, this is one of my “cheats” when I feel a poem pushing but my fingers hurt too much to write or type. Like writing, my muse knows how to sift through available words to create the emotion and texture the poem desires. It helps that somewhere in my brain, I already am aware of what tiles I have – I have added prefixes & suffuxes, modifiers and transition words to the pre-packaged words. Not to mention I made sure that common words have more than one tile available. So I have quite a bit of range available with this tool.

I also have a magnetic poetry app on my phone, though I am often dissappointed with it; it stops working 1/2 the time I open it. I’m not really one to play games on my phone; “bitch” loses her power quite often and I don’t see “wasting” her battery on them. But I do often compose poetry with her and will open the magnetic poetry app up if I wasiting for something. (It features “zombie poetry” on one of it’s options.) When I get results I am happy with, I can send it directly to my phone’s writing app or e-mail it to me.

Just as a artist is encouraged to draw scribbbles everyday, to get better at composition placement; magnetic poetry (and haiku) is a good tool for improving your poetic skills.

Now for the prompts:

Robert Lee Brewer’s AprPAD challenge prompt is (blank) system – replace the blank with your choice.

NaPoWriMo‘sfeatured blog today is Paul Scribbles. The poet they chose for today is Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who has one of her chapbooks filled with letter-poems with Ross Gay.

Andfrom that poet, they challenge today’s poem to take the form of a letter.

.As for my personal Poem A Day Challenge , today’s PAD is … fresh Easter Roses.

And one of my magetic poems? This one is part of my Waitng Room Collection.