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Happy National Poetry Month (a bit late ... hey, cut me some slack I've been busy). To celebrate, I'm getting back into creating randoms word poems (I take 6 words from a random word generating website and write a poem using them).  Get in touch and share your efforts with me - I'd love to see them!  

I have been thinking about getting back on YouTube for a while now (a friend and I used to have a fledgling lifestyle channel together), but with a more writing/reading-related focus.  Since I am still between homes (sold old place and new one is still not fixed up en ough to move into) I haven't felt able to start back up on YouTube. I figured no one wants to see me and five small noisy dogs cramped into a tiny bedroom (with all but current schoolbooks still in boxes). Not quite the background I would like to present. But then I thought, I could always try recording and posting my real time random word poem writing sessions. They're short, and hopefully/possibly interesting. Now I admit this first video needs to be improved upon greatly when it comes to camerawork. But it's a first attempt, so cut me some slack. I'll work out the kinks as I go.  

Words I had to use: apparatus, listen, eye, son, drunk, women. Words I didn't have to use (but did): in.

This came from a NYT piece found HERE , by Michelle Goldberg .

This is from a Washington Post opinion piece by Max Boot , found HERE .

Today's offering is from an article by Apoorva Mandavilli from the NYT, found HERE .

For a long time now I have been doing daily (or almost daily) poems based on random words. I got the idea originally from a poetry contest which offered 5 random words for you to use. I found it on twitter so I turned it onto a personal challenge to write a poem based on those 5 words that would fit in a tweet (back when they were 140 characters long). I'm so weird I found the challenge to be loads of fun. Eventually I moved to using an app which generated 6 random words, and I would handwrite a poem (of any length) in a journal I kept just for this purpose. That worked fine for years, but I found the writing/revising process rather messy when done with regular pen and paper - as a result my poetry journal became a lot of crossed out words, words written over other words, and arrows indicating how something should be moved from point A to B. There was also the added factor of wanting to post said poems online (instagram, twitter, a blog???) but in a photo/word art format. Since th

My blackout poem for the day, based on a Washington Post article found HERE by Eli Rosenberg

I used to do this years ago, but just fell out of practice I guess. Anyway, I thought it'd be fun to do again.

My blackout poem for the day, based on a New York Times piece by Michelle Goldberg, found HERE .

My blackout poem for the day based on a New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof found HERE .

My blackout poem for the day based on a Washington Post piece by Catherine Rampell found HERE .

Lately, very lately, I have taken to creating blackout poems. I was first introduced to this concept in a university Creative Writing course I took a few years back. Then I was reminded of it by reading Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist (which, for all I know, is where my instructor encountered it in the first place ... who knows, stranger things have happened). For years I've been writing a poem a day based on five to six random words. I'm such a weirdo I find this sort of thing fun. But, in doing the blackout poetry I am discovering something else - a way to process the news (aka reality) which borders on the therapeutic. I normally get something out of writing a poem - obviously - if that weren't the case I wouldn't do it. But what I normally get is something akin to a purge. Taking a news article and covering things up in order to uncover a way to make it about something else, is completely different somehow. Rather than purging something, it's more like