A Poem For Poet’s Day

Cloud Drift

Today is Poet’s Day (according to the prompt over at DS106 Daily Create) so I wrote a poem about a visit yesterday to a lake in the Berkshires. The day was the only rainy day of the week, which ruined some of our plans, but the conditions created an interesting effect on the water, with wisps of clouds hovering just above the water as rain dropped.

Wisps
just drift –
low clouds
along the edge
of the lake
where the two of us wait –
wondering
what this day might make

Peace (and poem),
Kevin

Poetry: A Heart, Reflected

A Heart, Reflected

This poem is via Open Write, with a prompt by a friend, Margaret, who often shared photos for inspiration under the title of “This Photo Wants To Be A Poem” that often spark interesting writing. Here, she shared an image from a paddle, where she and her husband noticed a heart reflecting in the water (from what appears to be some trash on the shore).

Peace (in reflection),
Kevin

Poetry: Memory Song

Memory Song

This poem comes from a prompt over at Open Write, in which we are encouraged to play with visuals and shapes of poems. I wrote a six line poem about about music as memory, and then decided I would ask Claude AI to create an interactive illustration, in which the six lines becomes the six strings of a guitar. It did what I asked it to do. And I got it to add a sound of a string when the line gets plucked.

Check out the interactive guitar/poem

The image above is me, flattening the poem into a single image.

Here is the text of the poem:

A song is something
to remember a memory by –

a melody hiding inside
a scaffold of a poem –

Sometimes, you sing together;
sometimes, you sing it alone

Peace (singing it),
Kevin

Bird Poems: Fling and Covey

Sandpiper Dance

I often use one word prompts off Mastodon for writing morning haiku poems and yesterday and today were bird-themed. In thinking of the prompts — Sandpiper and Quail — I also discovered the names for groups of each. A Fling of Sandpipers. A Covey of Quail. Cool.

Covey of Quail

Peace (and poems),
Kevin

Poetry: Gap

Gap Poem

The other day, there was a prompt at the DS106 Daily Create in which we were asked to find a quote or a poem, and take a word from that text and build a poem around it.

I went to Annie Dillard for this passage:

“Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

And I focused on the word “gap” to write this poem:

there, beneath
where you once
removed the river rock,
and tossed it to the trees,
an outline remains,
a pocket for rains

smooth sands
by gravity’s fingers;
and in your mind,
the rock’s still there;
it’s the gap that disappears

Afterwards, I really wanted to do something visual with the poem, and I tried all sorts of ways to show that there was a “gap” in the space where the rock once was, where there was a pocket of rain, but all of my experiments went nowhere.

In the end, I asked Claude AI to design a visual, and spent time giving it instructions — even at one point, asking it to create an interactive site where a reader could remove the stone, to leave a gap, and have the words of the poem become scrambled — but Claude failed in that. It did, however, generate the artwork I have here, which is not terribly bad, and better than the art I was designing.

Peace (and poems),
Kevin

Yet Another Home for Blink Blink Blink

blink blink blink

In 2006, I composed my first real media poem (read about it here, if you are interested, but know the links in past posts are all dead links) called Blink Blink Blink.

Since then, I have struggled to find a way to host it. I’ve jumped from places like Thimble, and Wikispaces, and Glitch, but now I see that Glitch, like all the rest of what I thought of as the open web of creative coding, has shut down its hosting of apps and projects like Blink.

Luckily, I was able to get the HTML files off Glitch and now, the poem will be hosted here, at my own blog, which probably makes the most sense anyway.

Experience Blink Blink Blink

Peace (and poems),
Kevin