It was just for posterity. They were all previous Notes postings and they were getting buried deeper into the Proseological Strata. Started about 5 months ago.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day © Archive
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That was fun :-)
Time for the crank to crank out more crankiness.
I'm starting this non-sense back up, so stand clear if you don't want to get light headed from the fumes.
breathing in deeply... 
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Eat more fiber if you get Writer's Block. Suitable sources of roughage would be:
- iambic pentameter
- dactylic hexameter
- trochaic tetrameter
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©
They say in every acorn there is a tree, and so too a forest.
If each word you choose is a seed, what kind of plant would grow that seed? What kind of forest? Would it be a tree bearing sweet fruit, or a strangling vine wrapped around its host? Would the forest be a cool, verdant copse... a sanctuary? Or would it be a dark, treacherous jungle filled with hidden danger?
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©
Try write a short poem about a moment you laughed so hard that you lost your breath - without using even one onomatopoeia.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©
When you have nothing flowing from your hara, that's when you commit harakiri.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©
If chess teaches me anything, and teaches me over again, it is to pause and "flip the board" occasionally - not just analyze from my side. Too often I forget the other person is NOT playing the SAME game as I have going in my head.
This applies to poetry too. Don't assume what they hear and feel when they read is what you are hearing and feeling when you read it.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©
Choose your narrative mode wisely. If it's a horrific topic, choosing 1st person narrative may alienate you. In a case like that, if the narrator is ambiguous enough, a "safe distance" can be projected by the reader depending on their comfort level. If the topic is sentimental, 1st person may seem ego-centric, but trying second-person may invite the reader in.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©
pluck the minutes from the trees of your hours - each day a garden
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©
Tonight when you lie down to go to bed, while you lie there with your eyes shut, imagine your skull is an aquarium. Picture your thoughts as tropical fish darting about, with your brain as a coral backdrop. The bright, colorful denizens explore the inside of your head, perhaps bumping up against your eyelids hoping for a peek or hovering near your eardrums listening for sounds from outside.
Now imagine in the depths a large, shadowy form - Sleep. It is a predator, bleeding out inky darkness to confuse stray thoughts. As the school of your consciousness loses coherence and community, thoughts on the fringe drift into murky drowsiness and become numb, unable to swim back and warn the others.
One by one, your plans and memories of the day are dulled and lost, snatched by long, icy tentacles to be shoved petrified into its nightmare beak and torn apart. Inside, all that you were thinking before you fell to Sleep is digested in chunks - some becoming the ink and tentacles of tomorrow night, the rest being shat out into chunks deposited into the silt layers of your memory.
In the morning, your alarm clock shocks Sleep from its hiding hole and into the open red-glow of consciousness seeping in through you half-opened eyes. The small fry of new thoughts are hungry and gnaw at the wilting behemoth as it blindly slaps its arms about without effect. It wilts and is slowly dissected until it becomes the meal of the new thoughts of the day.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©
Writing the wave. Do you know what a hydrofoil is?
When your pen rolls across the paper it becomes a hydrofoil submerged just below the surface of language as your thoughts push you riding smoothly over its choppy surface. Writing the wave.
Poetry tip-o-the-day ©
Midnight is but the deepest shade of the Blues, but its compliment is Golden Dawn.
adambarko wrote:
Writch:
No matter how hard I try, I just can't force myself to read even half of these in one sitting. It's like when I was 13 and tried to eat all the candy I collected on Halloween -- I got sick long before I got to the bottom of the bag.
A little too much sugar here. I need smaller doses.
I am diabetic, and sugar is toxic to me. So I know when something is too sweet.
Writch's ideas are deep and tastey, like fresh vegetables and fruit in autumn.
I think it is far too easy to knock down towers, and takes a lot more work to build them.
I took adam's comments as a compliment - The wine was so good he drank himself into a stupor and so asked the bartender to cut him off.
That's why wine tasters spit out the wine after sampling.
For the aquarium excercise, an alternative view would be to look at the daytime thoughts as fish in water, and the nighttime thoughts as shadowy birds in the air, the one being the positive, the other the negative...:
(image copied from www.mcescher.com)
Poetry Tip-o-the-Day: "Prattle" rhymes with "cattle." Moo, people, moo.
poetry tip-o-the-day: be sure not to over-capitalize or punctuate because you may unintentiontionally inject more intensity than your average emo-boy is a allowed to read aloud.
Poetry tip-o-the-day©: 'Blue' is as much a tone as it is a color. It has a texture, a scent, a flavor. Make a melody with it, warp it into a tapestry, dab it on your wrist and your neck, sprinkle it on a pastry; but Teal is just a color - don't get too fancy with it or you'll fail miserably.
Poetry Tip-o-the-Day © - Write in the nude. Totally take all those clothes off that your mind dresses you up in every day so that it can pretend you are the person it wants people to THINK you are. The best writing is from the mind that is a naked as the day it was born.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day© (for Kids!): Fish pee and poop in the sea.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day© (for Teens!): Life is so much more than romantic love and/or angst. Tell me instead about why speed thrills you (not the drug), or why sleeping-in is so alluring.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day© (for Seniors!): Poems are know for their emotional power. Try a poem for those messages that you have to leave on your children's voicemail - "Quilt" rhymes with "Guilt"!
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day© (for Poets!): Please, just carry on.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day© (for Contact scientists): Send a Poet.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day © (for God!): Thanks, Amen.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: It's scietifically proven that blue ink is better than black ink in the writing process. However, the converse is true when it comes to digital authoring (pixel colors). So, when online: write in black, but print in blue.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Bite into a ripe plum pulled off the tree. Close your eyes. Notice the soft, firmness against your lips as you gently pierce the smooth skin with teeth. Feel warm, moist sweetness trickle down between your lips, over and around your teeth and onto your toungue. As you reluctantly pull it away, look at the wounded fruit between half-closed eyes and see how your teeth dragged the purple of the skin into a lipstick smear across the glistening exposed flesh inside.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Earthworms are hermaphrodites. THAT is why they make delicious fish bait.
Poetry Tip-o'the-Day ©: The funnydrippers wear painted comedy masks while shoving their faces into the tearjerker tragic visage carved into the backside. Can I get a witness?
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: There has never been a Pulitzer Prize awarded for fart jokes.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: One day we'll look back and laugh. And then cry all over again.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: See that man under the bridge? The one sleeping in urine soaked pants, using an old couch cushion for a pillow and a collapsed cardboard box for a mattress? He is twitching and smiling while he dreams. Why? Write me his dreams.
Poetry Bonus Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Once your done with the homeless man's dreams... sing me a song about the nightmares of his mother who hasn't seen or heard from him in 9 years.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Flowers are pretty.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: www.rhymezone.com
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: On the cusp of night, the dried grass crinkles under my son's bare feet as he tiptoes among the fireflies - only interested in tapping the rhythm of the cicadas into his forehead with a decapitated pinwheel.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Dreams are like rainbows. Only idiots chase them.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: peel, strip, scrape. unscrew, unbolt, yank apart. pull down, tear down, knock down. pound hard, reduce to rubble, smash to bits. pile it, torch it, burn to ashes. gather it, cast to the wind, toss it over cliffs, sink it in oceans. wait. longer. now begin.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610...
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: 20 years later, I don't laugh as often, but I laugh deeper. The moments of joy are measured by the crumb, not the loaf. And I don't cry as much, but when I do, the tears are wrung from my bones.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Read csharpe's _Sprinting Along the Border_ in the thread called "simple little poems" (it's #85). Excellent piece.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Welcome to Summer Camp, Brothers and Sisters! We LOVE You! (psssst! don't drink the Kool-Aid!)
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Forget about OUTSIDE the box... just don't think OF THE BOX in the first place! (pssst! the box is an artificial socio-political construct - just ask a mime)
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Show me a person who has not had this nightmare about their exes, and I will show you a liar.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: If you want comments on your poems - first post a thread, then notify people here about the thread (exactly like Rael).
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: The language of time is interchangeable with language of color and shade. Emotions color the images of our past, but contrasts of light and shadow in our choices provide the forms.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: This blade of grass. Bent under the weight of dew drops and a dandelion seed, it is supported a by fallen twig. See instead an old monk in a jade robe, with a wisp of white hair and sweat on his brow, leaning on a cane as he slowly walks to the temple.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: when you must kill your plans for the future, bury them very deep in your backyard in unmarked graves so that headstones and putrification of their decay shan't work their way into your final thoughts of the day as you nod off to sleep - tainting your dreams, twisting them to nightmares.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: First, care less about everything, then care more about something. Care so much about it that it becomes inseperable from you. Then separate from it - put it to paper. Then care about it a little less so that others may care for it. Let them care more for it. Then they will care for you.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: use the parable of the zero soul as a means by which your readers can retrace to the path to wholeness.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Don't forget to freshen the water, refill the kibble, and change the litter box for your Muse - a happy Muse has a happy Writer.
Poetry Tip-o'-the-Day ©: Tall waves of cicada song wash over me as I squat on the asphalt curb of street buckled in the heat. Balancing on one foot and pulling the other foot up akimbo over my knee, sweat runs down my back and arms, drips from my brow and burns my eyes... I scrape gooey tar off the soles of my sandle with a brittle stick and day dream of the days long ago when this was fun.
Poetry Tip-o'-yer-Life ©: Call your mother and tell her you love her.