April is national poetry month. Usually I'm doing a lot out in the world right now. Since the world is keeping us inside, I'm having to celebrate the power of poems a little differently. In-person events I'd been working on for weeks or months have been cancelled, but I can still keep some things going more subtly.
Some poets set themselves the task of writing a poem a day for this month. That's wonderful. Being honest about my own mental bandwidth right now, though, I knew early on that wouldn't be in the cards for me this year. Still, I wanted to encourage myself to follow a daily creative impulse of some kind. That's where these photos come in.
In the last week of March I started cutting out words from old magazines around the house. This is a weird tick I come back to every few years. When I had a quartz-sized yogurt container full of shiny clippings, I started pairing clusters of words with other small objects I had at home. Now I'm posting photos of these collections--one each day through April--and inviting people to write what they see. It's been a fun way to keep engaged. I'm about half-way through. Take a look at what I have so far.
Check back again later in the month. Maybe I'll post the rest.