Lifting the “ordinary”

One of my jobs as a Poet is to lift the “ordinary” into plain sight, showing how extraordinary it is. This is also a great mindfulness exercise – just relaxing into the present moment to notice something beautiful that might otherwise go unnoticed – for me and for the reader. For instance, this morning was

Night of the Radishes

Found Poems are those where phrases are borrowed from magazines, catalogs, etc., and pieced together into interesting poems. Here is one I wrote using an issue of National Geographic : )

Another Universe

A fun poetry exercise that gets your creativity flowing is Found Poems. You take a stack of old magazines, choose interesting phrases from various pages and articles, and piece them together. The result can be startling! This exercise has you place phrases and words together that you might not put together otherwise – it opens

Rubbing words together

Would you like to learn a simple exercise to create interesting imagery and fresh poems? I was honored to receive an award for teaching poetry writing to children, and this was one of the main techniques/exercises I used (I’ve used this exercise with adults, too – in workshops/seminars). I learned this technique from Babara Juster