# NaPoWriMo Day 3: Playing with Sounds

Water bones resized
Water Bones (2020) arrangement and photograph by Maria L. Berg

On my search for “chromatic notes” in nature around my house, I found this odd assortment of bones in the water and on the rocks nearby. I found one similar to the largest bone about two months ago. I believe they are fish bones, but they could be bird, so I played archeologist and made a fishbird.

Blogging A to Z

Today’s theme is playing with sound and creating a word bank, so my “C” music terms might make it into the poem today.

chromatic – chromatic notes are notes that do not belong to the diatonic scale (the key signature).

counterpoint – the texture resulting from combining individual melodic lines.

crescendo – gradually get louder

NaPoWriMo

Prompt: List ten words then use Rhymezone to find two to four similar or rhyming words for each to create a word bank to use in your poem.

I’ve used Rhymezone as my rhyming dictionary for a long time now, but I only used the “Find Rhymes” feature. I hadn’t explored any of the other options. It’s a whole new world. 🙂

For my word bank, I started with my three music terms then I grabbed the most recent literary magazines I have and turned to random pages.

From New England Review Volume 41 I added: single, picture, footprints, qualified

And from The MacGuffin Vol. XXXVI I added: manufacture, waiting, prickly

Turns out I chose some great words for this exercise, and now my word bank is so loaded, it could give out loans. However, an idea for how all those words want to combine into meaning still escapes me. Time to go walk around the house to find some inspiration.

PAD Challenge

Prompt: Follow (blank)
This prompt means to put a word or phrase after the word Follow as the idea for your poem.

The poem

Follow Along With The Chromatic Song

Sick of static, I searched aquatic
And found these bones

Chromatic notes in nature
An innuendo, a memento in the splendor
A flicker in the mixture becomes a picture
A fracture creating counterpoint to enrapture

The bones could be fishy but tricky
I find them acrobatic though tragic

Moving mountainside, I glide
Toward the prickly quickly
And manufacture a capture
Qualified to crystallize
A snatcher of pasture
But then a wrinkle

Concentrating, alternating surprise and confusion
Tempo and crescendo of the pulse intermingle

Equating verified with horrified
And sickly with crispy
I stared at the midpoint now a joint
Compromised alongside and single
So glad it has yet to intermingle with
my car or house or
Me, either waiting or lucky

 

#NaPoWriMo Day 2: A Place in Space

fabricglass textile art by Maria L. Berg
Broken (2006) fabricglass textile art by Maria L. Berg

Today’s prompts inspired me to pull one of the pieces I made after Hurricane Katrina out of the closet and take some pictures of it. The place in the space between the two figures represents a playhouse and a greenhouse separated by an entire country.

Blogging A to Z

Since today has a theme of place and space, I found some musical terms with that theme in mind for my “B” words:

Busker – a person who plays music on the street

Baffle – A free hanging acoustical sound absorbing unit. Normally suspended vertically in a variety of patterns to introduce absorption into a space to reduce reverberation and noise levels.

Bailecito – small dance

NaPoWriMo

Prompt: “write a poem about a specific place — a particular house or store or school or office.”

The resource for today led me to an interesting website Poets House. Since my internet was too slow to load the PDF recommended, I explored what else the website offered and was happy to discover Poetry Trading Cards which they paired with archived readings by the poets on the cards. What a great idea. Maybe later, in the middle of the night when all of my neighbors are asleep, my internet will work better and I can enjoy the Digital Chapbook Collection. It looks wonderful.

PAD Challenge

Prompt: write a space poem

Today, the two prompts fit together, in my mind, which creates a nice theme.

The poem

Finally, A Place of Bounty

The big house
an imagined paradise
made prison by heartbreak and circumstance
long before mandated isolation

With a beautiful view
now masked by clouds
fickle weather creates an excitement
that doesn’t deter mating water foul

Hail bounces off the grass
its black patches of dead moss
blemishes to evidence Dad’s last visit
surrounded by early dandelions and heather

Since my tragic arrival so long ago
I have saved this place from self-destruction
by tree root-blocked septic, rusted water heater,
spraying pipes that give up, so much water

As if my drowning
could manifest in a house
But now, as the world joins me
I want for nothing

I open a closet and find
the fun and forgotten
I haven’t hoarded; I can’t afford it
But what I hid from myself surprises

 

 

 

 

 

National Poetry Writing Month is Here!

Greet the day with song resized

Blogging A to Z

This year I wanted to do something a little different. I’ll still be exploring great words, but instead of new words I decided to concentrate on specific terminology. Every skill, concentration, study or craft has its own terminology. I thought I would add some music to my poetry by looking at the terminology of music from A to Z.

For my “A” words I’ll start with some words that express tempo (relative rapidity or rate of movement):

adagio – in a leisurely manner, slowly

allegro – brisk or rapid

andante – moderately slow and even, a walking tempo

NaPoWriMo

Prompt: “write a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life – one that typically isn’t done all that often, or only in specific circumstances.”

My action ideas: downhill skiing, water skiing, synchronized swimming, encountering a bear in the wild.

Today’s resource is the Synaesthetic Metaphor Generator. It wasn’t what I expected. Most of the responses I received were neither metaphors nor similes, but after many tries I got a few that I liked:

as lime-green as incandescence
her nerves are ebony lava tubes
my cells are amber nebulae

PAD Challenge

Prompt: a new world

The poem

Shaky Legs

Dragged slowly behind
The push and pull threatens
as I try to control my wobbly knees
and coax my feet with their unwieldy extensions
into position against the current

At my signal
–when I believe I am ready–
I am yanked from buoyancy
only to flail and twist in the cold
losing my legs in every direction
to be slapped hard on the way down

The rope circles back around
I grab for it
Again I fight into the correct coil
then call on the power
to break through the surface tension
and skitter across the waves
all for that one moment of glassy calm
that feels like soaring

 

Klecksography- Today’s poem: Shelter at Home

Shelter at Home

For today’s poem I used the Sasquatch magnetic poetry kit.

This ink blot shows the nice copper iridescent paint in the Golden acrylics I talked about in my Happy Accidents post. Poetry month starts a week from today. Are you getting excited? What are you doing to prepare for your daily poetry challenge?

Happy Reading and Writing!

Gator McBumpypants Hears a Scary Noise is free to download today and tomorrow.

I saw Jennifer Garner talking to Jimmy Fallon about the charity #SaveWithStories and I wanted to do my part, so my book is free today and tomorrow.

Gator McBumpypants Hears a Scary Noise

Get your free copy of Gator McBumpypants Hears a Scary Noise.

Happy Reading!

Innovations in Klecksography: Happy Accidents

mysterious appearance

This poem was made with the Sasquatch magnetic poetry kit. I thought this looked like Mothman. What do you see? If you sit back from the screen you can see the iridescence better.

I was having trouble getting enough color dropped onto the page with my new palette of watercolors, so I thought I would try my new techniques with acrylics. I pulled out an old set of Golden acrylics and I’m glad I did. Those caps were getting hard to take off.

golden acrylics

I tried going back to the eyedropper. Creating the correct consistency is going to take some practice and the flat palette was not conducive to my needs. Luckily, I have a plastic palette with “wells” that I can work with for our next innovations.

Acrylics are definitely more messy. And I might get carpal tunnel from the force of trying to flick blots. I have to use a separate brush for each color and I have to  change out the water often, but it’s the amount of paint in the rinse water that led to a very happy accident.

This set of acrylics has two different iridescent colors: a light greenish white and a copper. I used the white/green in the poem image. At one point in my work, I noticed the rinse-water was a very pretty color and then saw the iridescent shimmer swirl in it. It was so pretty. I pulled out my camera and used the movie function for the first time in years. The music in the background is what I was listening to at the time and the weird (kinda cat sneeze) noise is my camera focusing. You can mute it and listen to whatever you like to enjoy it.

*I am not promoting whatever comes up as “watch next”.

I think it will take a few more days to figure out how to work with the acrylics, but I like these happy accidents and will continue to look for them.

I hope you are finding happy accidents in your endeavors. I would love to hear about them. Please share in the comments.

Here’s to your health!

 

100 Million Mask Challenge Update

First, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is, I will not be doing a cool unboxing of the 100 million mask challenge sewing kit because they didn’t need me to sew masks. The good news is local businesses stepped up, so they didn’t need individuals to sew. Here’s the note I received:

Screenshot_2020-03-22 (6,373 unread) - mariaberg512 yahoo com - Yahoo Mail

Second, my internet is hit or miss on a good day and now that everyone in the area is home and streaming, it’s even worse. I will keep trying to post, but when I tried to post on Saturday, I couldn’t even load a picture. I’ll post when I can.

Here’s to your health!

Innovations in Klecksography: Changing the shape of the paper

alluring intrigue grows

For this poem, I used the Mustache magnetic poetry kit.

Today’s innovations were inspired by a design challenge on Spoonflower. Spoonflower is a great website that lets you design your own fabric and start your own fabric store. I have a shop called Mber Creations with a few bokeh photography designs that I turned into repeating patterns for fabric. I really like the samples they sent me of the designs on spandex. I plan to use them in my fabricglass fabric art.

The challenge is to create a fabric design with paper cut outs. The example they gave is based on work by Henri Matisse that he did late in life. His cut-out designs were turned into stained glass (below right). For my innovation, I started by cutting a piece of paper into a similar-ish leaf shape and then splattering it and folding it.

I found I was very timid with the paint when the paper was already cut. Then I pulled out some of my “failures” from yesterday and cut them into Easter Eggs. I like them, after I added more paint. The small one top right opens to be a card. Kinda fun.

Rorschach Easter eggs cut after

The most exciting innovation of the day, in my opinion, was using two folds to blot: vertical and horizontal, clipping on the horizontal after drying and using paper punch shapes.

two fold with paper cutting stamps

I hope you’re finding lots of ways to have fun and stay happy.

 

100 Million Masks Challenge: A way to help fight the virus.

Hi Everyone! I got a great phone call this morning. My friend called to make me aware of an opportunity to help in the fight against Corona virus.

mask

Providence medical is putting together sewing kits so people who can sew and have a sewing machine can make protective masks for medical professionals in their area.

I’m in Western Washington and the first kit pick-up is on Monday. I’ll let you all know how it goes. If you are in the area and want to participate please sign up!

Here’s to your health. We’re all in this together.

Innovations in Klecksography: Fail better edition

Butterflies and gator

I like this ink blot from the other day. I see two butterflies and an alligator. What do you see? For this poem I used the Genius magnetic poetry kit.

For today’s innovations in klecksography, I tried a bunch of new things:

I tried folding and blotting along the diagonal

ink blot diagonal fold resized

I tried folding along many diagonals:

ink blots multiple diagonal folds resized

I even tried creating shapes with my splatters:

shapes resized

In the top half, I went for a circle and the bottom was an attempt at a triangle. Can you see it? Neither can I. 🙂

Overall, today’s ideas resulted in ugly messes, in my opinion, but I think with less dots from a larger brush, I might be onto something. At least I have a couple new avenues of exploration. I have heard that innovation comes from failing, trying again and failing better. So here’s to failing better tomorrow!

Happy Reading and Writing!