5 Poetry Blogs:

 1) Poetry On The Brain:

http://www.poetryonthebrain.blogspot.co.uk/

An interesting blog that I found out is called Poetry on the Brain by Helen Mort. This blog contains a collection of contemporary poetry along with some images. The interesting part of this blog was that Helen Mort came up with something called “The Yossarian Poetry Challenge”. In this challenge she would use the concept of Yossarian Live. Yossarian Lives a search engine in which when a word is looked for it would generate unusual but linked images, this is unlike google where the most relevant images are found. This helps a poet to explore their creative side by using the latest technology. In this blog, Mort uses the modern day technology to come up with her poetries. She, first looks up for a word in Yossarian search engine and then writes up a short poetry on one of the images that she finds.  One of her poem is called Home which is given below along with the image that inspired her for this work

Link to the search engine:

https://yossarianlives.com/

Home

Home is a blank square

inside a solid, wooden frame.

A canvas, white as magnolia,

pale as your fear and square

like an envelope, missing

an address. You stare into it

every day, invent the scene:

arrange three dining chairs,

put down a single, patterned rug.

You could make your home

anywhere. You could hold

the frame out, take imaginary

photographs. You could peer

straight through it, into it,

pretending its a mirror, pretending

you like what you see.

-by Helen Morot

 

 2) Bear Creek Haiku

 http://bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.ca/

A haiku poem is a three line poetry with 5 syllables in first line, 7 syllables in second line and 5 syllables in third line. So it is constrained to the use of 5-7-5 syllables. This blog contains information about haiku poetry along with some great examples of the poems. The poems are submitted by people from all around the world. A new blog task called bear creek haiku was posted on 21^st May 2015, which encourages poets from all over to submit their work through mail or email. A bear creek haiku is a four sheets legal sized blue paper cut in thirds lengthwise, stacked, then folded, two blue staples at fold = 48 pages of poetry and art (bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.ca). This blog also contains good examples of visual haiku poetry. Here is an example of visual haiku:

 

3) Warning The Stars

http://warningthestars.blogspot.ca/

This is a blog by a poet Stacy Lynn Mar. Her blog Warning the Stars is a modern poetry blog.  She creates a challenge to come up with a visual poetry. According to the challenge she, than writes a visual poetry and posts it on the blog.  Stacy Lynn Mar is an American poet and her works have also been published in more than 35 magazines. In one of her recent challenge she uses a box to portray the way to live “out of the box”.  To complete this challenge she creates an image of a girl sitting on top of the box and enjoying her freedom. One thing I loved about this blog is how an image used to convey a deep thought.

Here is the image that conveys her thought of living “out of the box”:

 

4) Poems Ans Poetics

http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.ca/

This blog is different from most of the blogs I have included here. The blog as the name suggests is all about poetries. It is full of content and works from different poets. Most of the poems posted on the blog seem to have a similar style of writing as e.e.cummings. They include line breaks, odd punctuation and parenthesis.  The appearance of the blog is quite simple and appealing. I think it was done intentionally so that readers could focus on the content of the blog rather than its appearance.  The author of the blog has really worked hard to gather timepieces of poetries from various famous poets.  I would like to share poetry by Serge Pey from this blog that appealed to me the most:

 

5) Verbatim Poetry

http://vernatimpoetry.blogspot.ca/

This poetry blog is a collection of poetries from the ordinary. This blog showcases a completely new way of poetry writing. In order to write a verbatim poetry there are certain rules to be followed by the poet. The task is to extract a whole passage of text from a writing that is not poetic and add line breaks (verbatimpoetry.blogspot.ca). The writer of the poem cannot add their own words or take text from a poem, song or a novel. The text has to be something ordinary like newspaper article, a prescription etc.  Consider this example of poem that is made by extracting text from Section VII of the Sabha Parva of Mahabharata, selected from Variants of Agni. 

Which Of These Fires From The Fire Catalogue Would You Like For Your Birthday?

(#3) the perpetual house-hold fire?

(#4) consecrated fire taken from the house-hold fire and placed in the east side?

(#7) powerful, mighty fire?

(#8) the fire that destroys?

(#9) the classical fire, belonging to the world of men?

(#10) the old or ancient fire, the fire pertaining to the stomach?

(#11) the entwining fire?

(#17) the calm, peaceful, serene fire?

(#20) the luminous, pure, brilliant fire?

(#21) the fire who is the priest?

(#22) the great, auspicious fire?

(#24) the fire consisting of wealth, or of good things?

(#26) the fire which is ethereal?

(#27) the conveyor of virtuous persons to heaven?

. . .the fire of time?

the fire of hunger?

the cold fire?

the fire of anger?

the fire of knowledge?

-by Maya Surya Pillay.