Gathering

One of the things I love most about writing is gathering words.

I've always been bookish, loving to read, loving the dips and turns of language, and its always there that I find my poems. I keep a notebook--I'm not one that saves my diaries, writing very prettily in them and lining them up along the bookshelf to count the years--I keep a notebook with daily to-do lists in the front, a weekly menu in the middle, project list somewhere toward the end, and my scrawling first-drafts, false-starts and word-lists at the end.

I love creating word lists. Its where my poems almost always start, unless they just "come to me" all of a sudden, like a penny dropped in a fountain. I have no rhyme or reason for why a word makes it onto one of my lists--I hear it, or, more often, read it, and immediately think "Poetry!" and scramble to jot it down.

Here is the word list where I got a recent poem, and you are welcome to use it too if you would like, just promise you'll email it to me or post it here below--I'd be interested to see how different our poems would be, two poems from the same word list can still be very vastly different!


Word List 11/12
mesh
message
gauze
scroll
secret
cluster
jar
closed
dissatisfaction
ships
paper