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The rearranging muse
I was alerted by ayngel's journal about the existence of the online version/teaser site for Magnetic Poetry. .Though I was glad to be able to see a preview of the words in their newer sets, I found using it very unsatisfying. For me, magnetic poetry is physical, and social, and the online version's neither.
I've had magnetic poetry magnets on my fridge since about 1997 or so. I was tickled the first time I saw them, in a little artisan crafts store in Ithaca, and I bought quite a few sets as gifts before finally indulging myself with one. Magnetic poetry in our house is an interactive medium, a slow conversation between casual visitors, relatives, friends, and lovers. Something for early-rising houseguests to do while their tea water's boiling. Something it's definitively okay to touch. We rarely make poems ourselves, and we never disassemble what's there, except by the same rules everyone else uses.
The rules are as follows:
Please create phrases and poems on our refrigerator.
If you need to steal words from some other poem to make your poem, go ahead.
If you think you can improve something that's already up there, go ahead.
Some poems mutate over time: there's a long piece that starts 'we cook for you' and then lists rather disturbing foods that people seem to always want to tinker with: "puppy blood sausage/delicious and fast". There's a long, beautiful multistanza piece about predation that was built by a regular from our gaming group who moved away some time ago. That one's barely been touched for years, though it monopolizes many of the best words. Somehow it must seem complete. A weeklong houseguest can leave zir mark for months, warm memories pouring out of short phrases each time I look at them. And there are some things that just sit there, like a pile of papers that you mean to clean up at first, but that somehow become part of the household landscape. "maybe I was born a bug"; "you drive/I can sleep in the car. Sometimes I see something that I never saw there before, and I don't know who did it.
I get a lot of corporate holiday gifts, as one of the very small perks of being a decision-maker in potential large sales for my vendors. Often, they are calendars. Kerry Ingredients usually does fairly creative ones, and this year they did one with magnets. The vaguely metallic paperboard it was made with wasn't actually strong enough to hold the large magnets with pictures of plates of cookies and breaded chicken (which one could assume were made using their fine ingredients) nor the magnetic American flag and eagle that they'd included as part of the recent wave of iconic patriotism. But the magnetic poetry words stuck well enough. It was a relatively small set of words, basics like "you" and "was" mixed with sensual words that might describe food such as "delicious" and "satisfying", mixed with the names and categories of ingredients they sell: "texturizers", "dairy isolates", "cellulose gum". I threw out the trade name ones, and tried to build something inspirational out of the rest, but there just weren't enough other nouns. Everything I wrote came out sounding like 'I create taste you develop delicious he finds satisfying aroma'. It was boring and eventually most of the good words fell between my desk and my cube wall anyway.
I purchased another version of the concept not that long ago: temporary tattoos with words on them, meant to be displayed on your skin. I put some of them across my cheeks for an event. I can't remember what exactly I wrote, but I'm sure it was relevant and pithy. From a distance, everyone thought I'd drawn whiskers on myself, and it turns out it was very uncomfortable to let most people get close enough to my face to read them.
I was surprised that my in-laws were completely uninspired by the set of magnetic poetry I gave them as a gift, since they're very much 'word people'. They're both professional writers, and I guess they found the small wordset uninteresting and limiting. But I'm an occasional tarot reader, and perhaps something of a logomancer, and I find that manipulating a limited set of rich symbols sometimes directs me to something new that I needed to hear.
I've had magnetic poetry magnets on my fridge since about 1997 or so. I was tickled the first time I saw them, in a little artisan crafts store in Ithaca, and I bought quite a few sets as gifts before finally indulging myself with one. Magnetic poetry in our house is an interactive medium, a slow conversation between casual visitors, relatives, friends, and lovers. Something for early-rising houseguests to do while their tea water's boiling. Something it's definitively okay to touch. We rarely make poems ourselves, and we never disassemble what's there, except by the same rules everyone else uses.
The rules are as follows:
Please create phrases and poems on our refrigerator.
If you need to steal words from some other poem to make your poem, go ahead.
If you think you can improve something that's already up there, go ahead.
Some poems mutate over time: there's a long piece that starts 'we cook for you' and then lists rather disturbing foods that people seem to always want to tinker with: "puppy blood sausage/delicious and fast". There's a long, beautiful multistanza piece about predation that was built by a regular from our gaming group who moved away some time ago. That one's barely been touched for years, though it monopolizes many of the best words. Somehow it must seem complete. A weeklong houseguest can leave zir mark for months, warm memories pouring out of short phrases each time I look at them. And there are some things that just sit there, like a pile of papers that you mean to clean up at first, but that somehow become part of the household landscape. "maybe I was born a bug"; "you drive/I can sleep in the car. Sometimes I see something that I never saw there before, and I don't know who did it.
I get a lot of corporate holiday gifts, as one of the very small perks of being a decision-maker in potential large sales for my vendors. Often, they are calendars. Kerry Ingredients usually does fairly creative ones, and this year they did one with magnets. The vaguely metallic paperboard it was made with wasn't actually strong enough to hold the large magnets with pictures of plates of cookies and breaded chicken (which one could assume were made using their fine ingredients) nor the magnetic American flag and eagle that they'd included as part of the recent wave of iconic patriotism. But the magnetic poetry words stuck well enough. It was a relatively small set of words, basics like "you" and "was" mixed with sensual words that might describe food such as "delicious" and "satisfying", mixed with the names and categories of ingredients they sell: "texturizers", "dairy isolates", "cellulose gum". I threw out the trade name ones, and tried to build something inspirational out of the rest, but there just weren't enough other nouns. Everything I wrote came out sounding like 'I create taste you develop delicious he finds satisfying aroma'. It was boring and eventually most of the good words fell between my desk and my cube wall anyway.
I purchased another version of the concept not that long ago: temporary tattoos with words on them, meant to be displayed on your skin. I put some of them across my cheeks for an event. I can't remember what exactly I wrote, but I'm sure it was relevant and pithy. From a distance, everyone thought I'd drawn whiskers on myself, and it turns out it was very uncomfortable to let most people get close enough to my face to read them.
I was surprised that my in-laws were completely uninspired by the set of magnetic poetry I gave them as a gift, since they're very much 'word people'. They're both professional writers, and I guess they found the small wordset uninteresting and limiting. But I'm an occasional tarot reader, and perhaps something of a logomancer, and I find that manipulating a limited set of rich symbols sometimes directs me to something new that I needed to hear.
Faux Refrigerator Wordart
I wet kiss you mother again and more
you can not love me if dogs talk
Trickster