"You And This War," by Hans Ostrom

ee cummings reads "Somewhere I have never travelled..."

Creative Quotations from Diane Wakoski for Aug 3

"Retro Love"

"A Delta Land of Used-to-Be," Cosmo Monkhouse

"No End To Love," by John Hartford

"Down Where I Am," by Langston Hughes

How Novels Begin: THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, by Arthur Conan Doyle

"Knight," by Hans Ostrom

"pity this monster," by e.e. cummings

What Are Your Favorite Words?

When I teach poetry-writing, I sometimes invite students to make lists of their favorite words--favorite chiefly because how they sound or intuitively "feel" to the writer, and favorite (secondarily) because of some personal connection to or memory about the word. I advise the students not to include too many words that they like simply because of a concept the word represents, like "freedom," unless the sound appeals, too.  But of course I don't "prohibit" such words. 

Such a list is useful in itself, but then you can also begin to work toward a poem by stringing some of the words together--going from specific language (with no subject in mind yet) toward a subject--and there's no rush.

Here's a link to a poem I read for Youtube, one made up of some of my favorite words; it's just a list poem, with "of" thrown in a lot as a kind of binding agent, mortar:

"Genitive Case"

"Sasha's Hooka," performed by Joe B. Vaughan, Jr.

"i like my body," by e.e. cummings