Molasses Poetry

fun with words

resourceress — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:32:45 +0000

Go to Wordle to create a colorful word cloud from a block of text – such as a poem or select words from a poem. You can alter the color scheme, font, and directional arrangement of the words. The only catch is that you need to attribute the image to Wordle (CC attribution license). Here’s one made from key words from Shine (click on image to enlarge it).

mythical creature on mountain bike

resourceress — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:41:33 +0000

A few days ago, my Dad and I stood talking in a parking lot near the Boulevard Bridge when a young guy in dark shorts and even darker sunglasses pedaled furiously up the road behind my Dad on a black mountain bike. The anomaly that made my voice fall silent mid-sentence was the large rhinoceros horn protruding from the front of the guy’s black and silver bicycle helmet. Apparently mechanical issues can befall even rhino-cyclists, however; a few minutes later when I drove out of the parking lot, I saw him kneeling beside his bike inspecting the wheel. I love scenes that evoke grins and wonder! This one did just that – a scene worth capturing in what poet Claribel Alegria calls a seed book – to grow into a story or poem later…

Woo or woe on the go

resourceress — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:27:26 +0000

As I was updating a personal anthology project guide for a teacher today, I ran across a mobile app (optimized for iPhones) that puts “the entire collection of over 2,500 poems on Poets.org, as well as hundreds of biographies and essays” in a mobile app. “Poems can be browsed by author, title, occasion, or form, and searched easily by keyword. Read a poem, anytime, anywhere—whether to fill a spare moment, woo a darling, toast a friend, find solace, or recite a few immortal lines—verse is now at your fingertips.”

To learn more and to download the app, go to Mobile Poetry.

Shine

resourceress — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:45:56 +0000

When the question ‘what if being gay made you glitter?’ popped into my mind on a midmorning hike along a mica-studded path, it led me to write “Shine”.

View this document on Scribd

If you’d prefer to listen to the poem, there’s an audio recording available on Chirbit. You may also download “Shine” in PDF. Two versions are available: one of the poem and another of the poem with ideas for using it in congregations and schools striving to be more welcoming to GLBT people.

I share “Shine” with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.