Jumping In

Remember those really annoying fridge poetry magnets that prevented you from ever effectively cleaning the fridge door? They got into children’s mouths, hoovers, dogs and if you were clumsy, the hummus. 

But when they were new, we had a set and the most unlikely people wrote poetry in our kitchen. Some of the poems blew us away. Some of them made absolutely no sense (even to the people who wrote them). Some of them were strange and wonderful.

Somehow, when they came across them for the first time,  the invitation of the magnets made people jump in. 

We took to jotting them in a book which then got lost behind the cookery books, and found again when we moved house.  By then, a lot of those friends had moved on, moved out, fallen out or in one case emigrated. 

Reading through the poems when I should have been sorting our endless gubbidge, I was struck again by the people who might otherwise have thought poetry pretentious, or felt self conscious, or just opened the fridge and got the milk out, and who had left traces of creativity behind for us because of those damn magnets. 

I packed the book.

Creative relaxation online

Two – write and record some poetry

I’ve been using the If poetry app for a while. It has some nice wandering line drawings and a gentle feel which is designed, I suspect, for children but which makes it rather a relaxing space. It has a modest but pleasingly random selection of poems. 

There’s a function which allows you to have poems read to you (by a number of well known voices) and another which allows you to compose and record your own poems.  These can then be sent via email. 

The If app is only available for the i-s and is a paid app. Currently the other drawback is that until they publish the update, you can’t record on IOS 7, so they’ve reduced the price to 69p… so, you might prefer:

The Poetry App from the Josephine Hart foundation. I personally don’t dig the Sherlock Holmes Study look, but I can see how it might feel cosy. Also it’s free, exceptionally easy to start using, and works on iPad, android and iPhone.

 You can have a large range of poems read to you, again by a constellation of voices. 

You can compose, record and email your own poems in a lovely font and they appear as fat, rather pompously satisfying, leather bound books in your library.

You can then try clicking on strange victorian cameos floating in a night sky to explore poetry by author.  Each poem is then reached via a Phineas Fogg style balloon. Mad. But within ten minutes I found a fantastic Philip Larkin poem Id never seen and wrote a poem about what it’s like here right now at the three lighthouses.  It’s below. 

Give it a try. Jump in. 

Grace and peace to you. 

Wild Spray

Wild spray, outside my window
Blusters and gesticulates in the dark
Fingerprinting the glass with salt
Tracing a message for the morning