Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

A couple weeks ago, in putting together a little zine on writing poems which use found/borrowed text, I happened upon some fun writing exercises. Here's one on writing "found or headline poems" by William Stafford and Stephen Dunning. Here's a list of 93 poetic experiments to try , compiled by Charles Bernstein. And here's a "word mover" tool from ReadWriteThink which uses Flash to let you move found words around to create your own poems; it lets you save/export the poems you create, too. I need to take some photos of my zine--it's called Found It! --and list it on my Etsy shop . Well, I need to do about a zillion other things, too, starting with catching up on the grading (I'm teaching one English 100 class and two English 101 classes this quarter) that I promised myself I'd catch up on this morning...

I've just uploaded the information about the next online poetry class I'm offering. It starts on June 21 and runs through July 21. I've compiled a new set of four assignments, so if you're currently taking my April class, you'd be doing all different assignments if you were to enroll in the summer class. I chose assignments for the class that have potential for reflecting a summery theme, but of course I welcome content on all sorts of topics. I just thought some writers might enjoy the idea of writing about summertime. As ever, I hope you'll help me in spreading the word about the class, and please do let me know if you have any questions. Many, many thanks!

One of my online writer friends, Rebeka, wrote an interesting post today about a famous two-line poem by Ezra Pound . In a way, poems like Pound's are sort of the English language version of haiku: concise and image-focused. You get a clear sense of action/emotion from just a handful of words. Writing very, very short poems like this can be a great writing exercise. Can you condense an observation or experience down into just two or three lines? Or what about stringing a series of very tiny poems together to form a short sequence? I'm also reminded of Laura-Marie , a poet who sometimes shapes poems by writing just one line a day until the lines add up into a poem that feels finished. I know I've written about similar (if not the very same!) writing exercises before, but that's because I think they work. :)

I happened to find a post today where someone linked to my blog as a place to find examples of poems in the hay(na)ku form. I decided to go back and label all the posts where I posted poems in that form--I did a series of collage pieces in 2010 which incorporated tiny poems using the hay(na)ku structure. Here's a link to the hay(na)ku poems I've posted. Looking at them makes me want to return to the form; it's fun, and it works well as a way to experiment with small bits of found text. If you want to write a hay(na)ku, the rules are simple: the first line has one word, the second line two words, and the third line three words. I also like to do sequences where I reverse the word count in some of the stanzas, alternating 1-2-3 and 3-2-1 patterns. The form was created by a contemporary poet named Eileen Tabios, who does a lot of cool projects, including editing Galatea Resurrects , a great collections of reviews of small press books.

The students in my English 100 classes recently submitted their essays about reading and interpreting poetry. They had three poems to choose from--in the essay they just needed to write about one poem and how their interpretation of that poem developed over time. (I thank Nancy Kennedy for the framework of this assignment; she gave it to me many years ago now.) I try to change up the selection of poems for this assignment, and this quarter I assigned "The Cabbage" by Ruth Stone for the first time. The full text of the poem is available here on poets.org . I think the students enjoyed this poem. Rereading it again I find it's a good example of a poem that makes interesting use of "you" rather than "I" for its voice; I think this can be hard to pull off. This poem would be a good basis for a writing exercise in which you write a piece in the second-person voice. Ruth Stone also has a great poem about having a burger at McDonald's, but it doesn'...

I wrote an article called "You Already Know How to Write" with the hopes of publishing it on a blog I follow, but the editor felt the piece was too writing-specific for her site. So I decided to post it on EzineArticles. Especially after my experience with the proofreading article circulating online, I thought it would be fun to see if other writers decide to share the article from the EzineArticles site. Here's a link to the article, if you'd like to read my thoughts on acknowledging the writing you do and self-identifying as a writer . By the way, if you are a writer and/or visual artist based in the greater Seattle area, you are invited to submit to Between the Lines , the annual student-edited literary/arts magazine of Edmonds Community College. I'm the faculty adviser for the magazine; the students make all the editorial decisions! The magazine includes a mix of student work and work from local writers and artists. Feel free to ask me if you'd like more ...

So I've been writing some little articles to post on EzineArticles.com, a website which hosts all sorts of content on all sorts of topics. The site gets good traffic, so it's a way to share my work and hopefully encourage people to check out other projects of mine online (like this blog or my Etsy shop , etc). I've written four articles so far. With the first three, I haven't received any feedback beyond a Facebook "like" or two. Now with the fourth article, I've received two emails in one night from people I've never met, and both of the people are telling me how helpful the article is. Go figure. It's an article about five strategies for proofreading your own work , based on ideas I've suggested to students (and probably most--if not all--of these ideas were suggested to me at one time or another by other writing teachers). I do think the strategies are useful, so maybe I've provided a public service to the writers of the world by pulli...

I was posting so regularly for a while! Well, it's hard to keep up a strong pace when you're busy grading final papers and calculating final grades and so on. Now I have a break until January 2. Maybe I'll even write some poems--I hope so! Recently, I wrote a little article about creativity and posted it at ezinearticles.com. I thought it might be a good idea to try posting my work elsewhere and maybe connect with a new reader or two. Here's the link to my article on three easy ways to increase your creativity .

I published an eight-page, single-sheet zine called Small Is Beautiful and shared copies with the participants in the workshop I taught at Write on the Sound earlier this month. The zine is subtitled "ideas for writing and publishing," and it contains ideas for four writing exercises as well as a few leads for publishing short poems and prose pieces. Basically, it's meant as a little bit of inspiration for those times when writing seems big and daunting, and it would help to remember that even the longest poems and novels came together one line at a time. If you'd like a copy of the zine, I'll send one your way for just one dollar via PayPal (shipping cost included in the $1). Oh, and here's one more picture of the zines in a vintage Kraft cheese box just because I only scored this box earlier this week, and I like it! Did you know processed American cheese used to come in wooden boxes?

I've been working on my presentation for the Write on the Sound conference in Edmonds. My workshop is called "Small Is Beautiful: From Postcards to Mini-Zines," and here's the description from the conference catalog: "Intriguing writing comes in small packages, from lines printed on coffee cups to forms like flash fiction and haiku. 'Think smaller' with ideas for experimenting with prompts that call for easy-to-manage bits and pieces of writing, and consider trying smaller-format projects to showcase your work such as printing postcards, making zines by hand, and sending tweets." We'll be writing poems or short prose pieces made up of a single sentence, and I think we'll also write postcard-sized pieces. An example of a single-sentence poem I like quite a lot is Emily Dickinson's poem about a railway train ("I like to see it lap the miles...).

I was thinking it might be nice to post writing exercises/ideas on my blog. For starters, here's a quick exercise to try with any text(s) on hand. Using what Jack Kerouac called the "American Haiku type... Simple 3-line poems... free of all poetic trickery" (see his Book of Haikus edited by Regina Weinreich), draw out three short lines from any text to shape a tiny poem. The only "rule" is that all three lines need to come directly from the text (or texts) you set aside to use for this exercise. Don't worry about syllables or writing a poem that feels finished. Just look for interesting images, ear-catching phrases, and so on. Try drawing lines from a newspaper article or magazine ad or travel folder or cereal box or textbook or piece of junk mail... When I give this exercise to students, I also give them a page or two from a magazine to use as a source text. It usually helps to limit yourself to a specific range of text--it's a good challenge to see...