Paint Chip Poetry | Reflections on the Teche

Posts Tagged ‘Paint Chip Poetry’

Poetry Friday: What Kind of Writer?

Posted in Poetry Friday, Writing, tagged enough, Irene Latham, OLW, Paint Chip Poetry, Wolf writer on January 21, 2022| 25 Comments »

Poetry Friday is with Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference

If you need a boost of confidence for your writing life, tune in to Irene Latham. She has started a Tuesday series on YouTube called “2-Minute Writing Tip Tuesday”. On her website, she has a quiz “What Kind of Writer Are You?” Take a minute to take the test for yourself. I did it twice and both times…

You’re the leader of a wolf pack! You’ve got lots of great ideas and love sharing them with others. You’re a great starter AND a great teacher. It’s your readers who motivate you—and they love you for it!

If you’re a Wolf, then you can stop trying to write highly personal essays that don’t feel natural to you. That’s not your strong suit. Write the fun thing, the thing you know your audience will love!
You can stretch yourself by taking time away from your community for rest and reflection. Give yourself an opportunity to develop new ideas before jumping into the next new, exciting thing.
Go ahead, give the world something to howl about!

Who doesn’t love a wolf writer! My favorite part of this is “You’re a great starter AND a great teacher!” I know it’s silly to be so excited to find out I am who I want to be. In fact, my One Little Word this year is Enough. I somehow knew it was time to stop questioning myself, my authenticity, my ability to connect people through writing. But it’s kinda fun to take these silly quizzes and find affirmation.

What kind of writer are you? What kind of writer do you want to be?

I participated in a few of the prompts in Ethical ELA Open Write this week. I wrote this poem using paint chip colors. (guacamole, candlelit beige, vining ivy, ancient copper)

Some Days it’s Enough to Wake Up
Finding my fingers
dipped–
green like guacamole–
in the soil of my life.
You place a candle on the table,
a small flicker of light
blessing the moment,
like vining ivy on a brick wall
tangles in on itself but never falls.
We are becoming
ancient copper,
stained hands
that have worked too long
in this soil.
We woke up alive today.
That’s enough
for now.
Margaret Simon, draft

Read Full Post »

#NPM19 Day 18 Draft

Posted in Poetry, tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, Christie Wyman, Paint Chip Poetry on April 18, 2019| 7 Comments »

Happy Poem in your Pocket Day! I am staying close to home today as huge storms are expected, so I will celebrate quietly this year. I usually carry with me two favorite poems, Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye and Wild Geese by Mary Oliver.

Yesterday I settled into a corner at Fair Grinds coffee in Mid City New Orleans with a vanilla latte and my journal. Christie Wyman is playing along with poetry this month. She’d noticed that I often label my poems with the word “draft” and a friend of hers thought that made the poem seem alive. Working with a stolen line, some paint chips, and that alive poem draft idea, I wrote this draft.

A Draft

Poems are alive
lapping at the sandy shore*
of my notebook.
Splashing in the waves
of hot sauce
sprinkled on my furious fingers.

Out of quarry depths
a draft
spotlights
on
something
worth
waiting
for.

–Margaret Simon (draft) 2019

*line from Christie Wyman

Read Full Post »

#NPM19 Day 15 Playtime Again

Posted in Poetry, tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, metaphor dice, Paint Chip Poetry on April 15, 2019| 5 Comments »

I lost trust in the process of this poetry playtime. So today I set out to make it work again. I read Elisabeth Ellington’s post using metaphor dice in a different way. She set up her rule of play: “I had to use one of each color (concept, adjective, object), and the dice I used had to touch each other. ” I looked at her picture of her box.

I decided to take mirror, silent, and teacher, but use mirror as the object rather than teacher and wrote “The mirror is my silent teacher.” With the use of a few paint chips, the words flowed again. I need to be more open to the process of creativity. It does work on occasion.

The mirror is my ~~silent~~ noisy teacher

babbling on

about this line

and that

showing off

dark spots

and yet

reminding me

that grandma loved

hydrangeas.

She tended her garden

like I tend my face.

Time teaches me

spirit rock lessons–

some hard as stone

some soft as ~~hearth.~~ home

— Margaret Simon, (draft) 2019

I did some editing on this, but now I realize that babbling is not silent. Perhaps I need to change silent to noisy? And then hearth is really hard, not soft, so maybe home works better. I wonder how true to the words I am given do I need to be. Word choice is a challenge set forth by every poem. What do you think?

Read Full Post »

#NPM19: Day 8 Seasons in Haiku

Posted in Poetry, tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, Paint Chip Poetry on April 8, 2019| 3 Comments »

National Poetry Month 2019: I am playing with poetry alongside Mary Lee Hahn, Jone Rush MacCulloch.Christie Wyman, Molly Hogan, and Catherine Flynn.

Today I read aloud Hi, Koo, a book of seasonal haiku poems by John Muth. Then we played with Paint Chips to make seasonal haiku of our own.

I found that I didn’t have to add many words to the Paint Chips to create a poem. I wrote one about every season.

Fall

Boundary Waters
pyramid of grizzly rocks
hot-potato skip, hop.

Winter

Inside a dew drop,
memories of rainstorm,
blizzard, sea foam.

Spring

A verdant seedling
in left field–succulent
Garden of Eden.

–Margaret Simon (drafts) 2019

Read Full Post »

#NPM19: Day 7: Where I Waited

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged #NPM19, Books along the Teche Literary Festival, Darrell Bourque, Mary Ardoin Broussard, metaphor dice, NaPoWriMo, Paint Chip Poetry on April 7, 2019| 4 Comments »

National Poetry Month 2019: I am playing with poetry alongside Mary Lee Hahn, Jone Rush MacCulloch.Christie Wyman, Molly Hogan, and Catherine Flynn.

This weekend in New Iberia was the third annual Books along the Teche Literary Festival. On Friday, I attended a reading by former state poet laureate and one of my mentors, Darrell Bourque. He brought along accordion artist Mary Ardoin Broussard.

Mary Broussard plays the old Creole style of Zydeco music known as La La music. Darrell’s poems from his book Where I Waited (Yellow Flag Press, 2016) are written in the voices of early Cajun and Creole musicians from the 1930’s and 40’s. Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana spoke French. I don’t speak French, so sometimes I have a hard time following along. I love this music for its dancing beat, but I can’t sing the lyrics and rarely know what they mean.

Darrell wrote about the song Quoi Faire in his poem for Golden Thibodeaux with the title “Here and Here.” Mary said quoi faire means “Why you broke my heart like that?”

Darrell then spoke of the energy in Golden Thibodeaux’s music. I, however, listened to the energy between Darrell and Mary, making their own kind of music by echoing and honoring the voices of the past.

I played in a different way with my own poetry finding new lines within the lines of Darrell’s poem Here and Here.

Read Full Post »

#NPM19: Day 6: Metaphor Wisdom

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged #NPM19, metaphor dice, NaPoWriMo, Paint Chip Poetry on April 6, 2019| 5 Comments »

National Poetry Month 2019: I am playing with poetry alongside Mary Lee Hahn, Jone Rush MacCulloch.Christie Wyman, Molly Hogan, and Catherine Flynn.

Today I have two drafts written with a roll of metaphor dice. I tend to roll them until I get something I think I can write about. “Truth is a glorified meadow” was a first roll and it stumped me. Before re-rolling, I asked my student Landon what he thought it meant. He said, “It’s like when you have the truth, you have a wide open field of possibility.” Such wisdom in a young 5th grader.

I also challenged myself to use the zeno form: syllable count 8,4,2,1,4,2,1,4,2,1 with each 1 syllable rhyming.

Truth is a glorified meadow
finding you in
a clear
field
open playground
without
shield
your forgiving
spirit
healed
–Margaret Simon (draft) 2019

For the next metaphor dice poem, I used magnetic poetry words to help guide the results.

Hope is a glorified dance
to delicate music–
a gorgeous goddess
whispering near,
misty gift here.
–Margaret Simon (draft) 2019

Misty morning oak

Read Full Post »

#NPM19: Day 5: A Stormy Day becomes a Poem

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged #NPM19, metaphor dice, NaPoWriMo, Paint Chip Poetry on April 5, 2019| 12 Comments »

Read Full Post »

#NPM19: Day 2 and Wood Ducks Update

Posted in Poetry, Slice of Life, Writing, tagged #NPM19, NaPoWriMo, Paint Chip Poetry, TECHE Project, wood duck house on April 1, 2019| 11 Comments »

See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life

Some of you have been following our wood duck house story. In late February, my husband built a wood duck house and set it up near the bayou. We put a Ring doorbell camera inside to capture the whole process. We were amazed when a hen came in the very next day. It took her a few weeks to lay the eggs and begin sitting on them. I wrote about it here and here.

The last time I was able to count the eggs, I had counted 13 eggs.

The problem with using a Ring camera is, with the constant motion of a hen sitting fairly consistently, the battery runs down. We changed it out once with no problem, but Saturday afternoon, it had totally died. Because we couldn’t look at the camera to see if the hen was in the house, my husband spooked her when he went to change the battery.

She came back for a brief minute then flew back out at around 7:30 PM. After that, nothing.

Did she abandon the nest altogether? Alerts to motion come onto my phone. I usually turn off notifications during the night but I didn’t Saturday. We waited for the buzz of the phone. Nothing.

Sunday morning I looked out the window, saying a few prayers that she would return. I saw the couple in the water. I practically begged at the window, “Please go back in. Please go back in.”

She flew up and around the house and landed back in the water.

I woke up my husband who admits he wasn’t really sleeping. I said, “There must be some kind of sound coming from the camera to scare her like that.”

He said, “To hell with broadcasting, we need to save these eggs.”

But taking the camera out didn’t prove necessary. I heard a buzz on my phone. She’s back! She was in the box, settling in, poking around, as if nothing had happened. Whew! Relief!

Jeff watched one of the videos from the camera and noticed that there was a hen perched at the hole flying out while another hen was in the box sitting. Could they both be sitting? Are they sharing the nest?

While our hen was away, I was able to get a shot of the eggs. She hadn’t had time to cover them before she left. I counted 20 eggs! Twenty!

If my calculations are right, and the 12 hour hiatus doesn’t change the incubation time, the eggs are due to hatch on or around April 11th. You know I will be posting. You can follow on my Instagram or Facebook page.

Now for poetry. I am playing with some fun poetry games. My students are playing along and posting on our Kidblog site.

With Paint Chip Poetry, I pulled honey, quicksilver, and under the sea. The prompt was “We’re all in this together.”

We’re all wild honey
under the sea
free and quick
like silver sparkles
together
making waves
splashing
sprays
whale family.

Margaret Simon (draft, 2019)

Read Full Post »

#NPM19: Paint Chip Poetry 1

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged #NPM19, NaPoWriMo, Paint Chip Poetry on April 1, 2019| 13 Comments »

National Poetry Month 2019: I am writing alongside Mary Lee Hahn and Jone Rush MacCulloch.

My box of Paint Chip Poetry arrived just in time for this month’s poetry writing. I am playing with poetry. In Paint Chip Poetry, you select a prompt which is a phrase, along with some paint chips. The paint colors have names. I’m not sure if I’m playing right, but here is what I got.

A little revision:

Far, far away
before the rain,
a sunburst glows
on scarecrow
makes him believe
in magic like gold
at the end of the rainbow.
–Margaret Simon, (draft) 2019

Matt Forrest Esenwine has the first line for the Progressive Poem. He is using found lines. The schedule is in the sidebar. National Poetry Month begins!

Read Full Post »