Okay, the 30 poems in 30 days challenged hasn’t been completed yet and I found my next assignment (if I chose to accept it). Rachel Berger, a graphic designer in San Francisco, wrote short writings inspired by paint chips. Read some of her samples.

Link: 100 Colors, 100 Writings, 100 Days

Days six and seven

Somewhere around day ten or eleven I fell off schedule. A lot of distractions and stress hit me like one tsunami wave after another. Last night I caught up with a binge writing session at a local bookstore. While having lunch (if a bagel and coffee qualify as a lunch) this afternoon at a cafe, I read through what I wrote last night and discovered some emotionally raw lyrics. Some of it is so personal it is not accessible to a casual reader. A closer investigation of the poem sketches reveal a controlled form providing a vehicle for anger. Whereas a poetic rant is the literary equivalent to vomit or oil gushing from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, an angry poem attempts a focused avenue for venom much like a fire hose targets the base of a fire. Not all the poems composed last night are angry poems; only a couple. However, the angry poem sketches I composed shift from formal to informal dimeter (an example of dimeter is “The Robin” by Thomas Hardy or the use of dactylic dimeter in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”). I wonder if editing the poems with longer lines, maybe like Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” or Ginsberg’s “Howl,” would change the tone dramatically.