If you’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more Poem Elf (and you’ve already had all the cow bell you can take)–
–Or– if you like poetry in very small doses and you don’t like reading long blog posts–
–I have a suggestion for you. Follow me on Twitter. @Poemelf is just pictures and not so often that it takes over your timeline.
I was slow coming to Twitter and even slower to realize that my original idea was lame. (I typed in excerpts from poems and tried to relate them to current events, the weather, celebrities, my personal life.) Now I’m just posting pictures of short poems (or short excerpts from poems) that I leave around town. Like I do on the blog, I take one up-close picture of a poem and one that shows where I put it.
No scandal, no trending hashtags, no selfies. Just a poem now and then where you least expect it. Check out the sidebar on the right for an example and consider following me @poemelf.
Also, if you live near enough Ann Arbor, you can catch a wonderful art show, running now through April 9. The Prisoners Creative Arts Project is sponsoring the 19th annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners at the Duderstadt Gallery on North Campus of University of Michigan. Link here for details.
With limited materials and in difficult working conditions, these artists have produced powerful works in many different mediums. It’s such a humane and emotional show. Longing, joy, rage, hope, anxiety–each piece seems like a part of someone’s soul. Here’s one of my favorites. It’s called “Gracias” and the artist is Martin Vargas:
Vargas features the Botero-like figures in many of his paintings. He calls them PUDGIES.
PUDGIES have a gentle spirit. They have no body shame and no obsession with clothes or hair.
I want me some PUDGIES in my life.
I like your original idea. I am slow coming to twitter because I am not coming to twitter at all. I don’t want the world reduced to 140 characters, we are more complicated than that and, though I know the world is rushing on, I don’t have to join the rush. I like your thoughtful, original, considered comments on such a wide variety of poetry, and I love the pictures that accompany them of the places you leave the poems. I love imagining the look on people’s faces at coming on poems in unexpected, ordinary places.
Sherry, thanks for your comments! I’m with you on resisting the rushed world, but I also want to reach some of the rushed people and invite them to slow down with a little poetry. Very, very little poetry….just a few lines taken from longer poems. I’m always trying to build a bigger audience for poetry.(But I’m not really helping the cause right now because my Twitter following is only slightly larger than my mother’s and she doesn’t have a Twitter account at all.)
I’m still going to be writing the long (probably too long) posts on the blog. But Twitter takes less time so I can post more often there.
Thanks again!