Where Does Your Poetry Hide?

Poetry is an ever inclusive part of my summer writes. It calls out to me to be included. In those lazy, hazy days, I shall seek it out in every corner ...
In truth, it's with me all year round, wherever I am. So, where is it hiding? Where is it to be found? Let’s investigate…

Where Does My Poetry Hide?

Where does my poetry hide?
It snuggles in snatches of conversations
floating down the street
It rocks about in my collected treasures
Junky and jumbled

I look for it in lettuce, limes and lemons
In asparagus, apples, even anchovies
It might be sealed a packet of peppermints
A jar of peanut butter
Escaping with aromatic intensity
Poetry washes up on the shoreline
in clusters of seashells
Glittering sea glass
Seaweed and wet sand

I seek it out in a song’s refrain
And voices in a playground
I find it nestling in my favourite books
It emerges in isolated words
and fabulous fragments
Angry and otherwise
It swirls in the mumbles and whispers rumbling against the internal walls of houses.
It develops in photographs that magically reveal my history

Poetry soothes me in sonorous voices on the radio
And thunders at me on stormy mornings
I can spot it in a day old newspaper article
or a marescent autumn leaf

Poetry reveals itself in my wife’s eyes
It announces itself in simple pleasures,
Or recollections of days long past
It is minute like smidgens and skerricks
Things barely seen or blown to smithereens
It is immense like boulders, bridges and reservoirs

I hear poetry in the morning carols of magpies
I wake each day knowing it’s out there
waiting for me to discover its hiding spots.

Alan j Wright

So poets bold and brave, where does your poetry hide?

Sometimes my poetry hides among other words

Poetry Inspired by Images and Objects

There are many ways pictures and photographs can be conscripted to support the writing of poetry. Allow me to share a few ideas with you: Old photographs are a great source of inspiration. Cynthia Rylant explored this idea with great success in her book 'Something Permanent' where she employed the Depression era photographs of Walker Evans to add a new voice to the starkness to the lives of people experienced under extreme circumstances. I have used this strategy to spark many individual poems. In ' I Bet There's No Broccoli On The Moon,' I used a photo I had taken in 2004 while living in New York to inspire a poem. The poem was based on a story related by a friend who grew up in New York. I regularly combined poetry and pictures in my writer's notebook, drawing on inspiration from the photograph and my personal memories. We can also utilize existing cartoons and illustrations to create ekphrastic poems. I frequently use the illustrations of Jim Pavlidis to co...

Opposite Poems

O pp o s ite P oem s In his book, ' How To Write Poetry,' Paul Janeczko presents the idea of opposite poems. Paul suggests they could also be referred to as antonym poems. This is wordplay and it's fun to try. Here are some examples Paul provides to help us see very clearly how these short little poems work. I think the opposite of chair Is sitting down with nothing there What is the opposite of kind? A goat that butts you from behind Paul Janeczko You will notice the poems are written in rhyming couplets. They can be extended so long as you remember to write in couplets. Paul shows us how this is done. What is the opposite of new? Stale gum that's hard to chew A hot-dog roll as hard as rock Or a soiled and smelly forgotten sock You might notice that some of Paul's opposite Poems begin with a question. The remainder of the poem answer the question posed. Opposite poems are a challenge, but it is a challenge worth trying. N...

Powerful Poetry, 'Refugees' by Brian Bilston

This week, Poetry Friday is hosted by Janice Scully @ Salt City Verse where Janice shares some original words and offers us a taste of Thomas Carlyle to ponder. I encourage you to join a host of poets from all around the globe and visit Janice's page... Almost two years to the day, I wrote a post featuring the poem 'Refugees' by Brian Bilston. The poem was included in Brian's first book of poetry, 'You Took The Last Bus Home.' A very powerful Reverso poem and technically brilliant. A Reverso poem can be read from top to bottom or bottom to top. It will often express opposite opinions depending on which way you read it. Such poems really make us think. A Reverso poem is like a picture turned upside down, a frowning face upended to reveal a smiling one. The poem read in reverse, contradicts itself with an opposing message. In 'Refugee' Brian Bilston focuses on a societal issue that tends to polarize feelings and the opposing views are clearly in eviden...

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