I was trying to follow the January 3rd prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell-Agodon and Martha Silano, which says to use fifteen words that you don’t normally use in your poems. I opted to grab several books and pick random words. Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied with the results I was getting, probably because I was still choosing the words—and they tended to be the kinds of words I would choose, whether or not I had used them before. So, I ended up with a tanka.
Tanka
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #27 (April 27, 2014)
Today’s entry was a tricky one. I had all sorts of trouble coming up with something I even halfway liked.
In the end, I went with the original prompt from NaPoWriMo.net:
…a poem written from a photograph.
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #15 (April 15, 2014)
Today’s NaPoWriMo.net prompt was giving me fits. The ottava rima that was last year’s Day 8 prompt worked out well, as it coincided with news of the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. For some reason, though, attempting a terza rima just had me encountering trite sentences and dead-end rhymes.
So, I decided to switch tack, and go with the 15th item on the list of prompts at PoeWar:
Write a tanka. Feel free to write more than one if you like.
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #11 (April 11, 2013)
Today’s prompt: a tanka. Should be simple enough; after all, the more widely known haiku is really just an abbreviated tanka. The difference is that a tanka has two additional lines of seven syllables each.
Today’s entry is actually kind of silly, but I’ve been doing battle with Roxio Toast, trying to burn a DVD copy of the new Christopher Titus special so I can watch it on my TV, instead of being stuck watching it on my computer. Unfortunately, the only decent software for creating DVDs on the mac is Roxio’s Toast, which has steadily gone downhill over the years—while Roxio’s tech support (as such) has remained maddeningly consistent in its level of suckiness.
I was actually able to successfully burn a copy—but, even though I had Toast set to widescreen, the DVD it burned was most definitely not in widescreen format. So, I had to do it over. Only Toast wouldn’t do it. No matter what adjustments I made to the various settings in order to reduce the size of the encoded video, Toast kept telling me that the video was larger than the capacity of the disc, even though it had been indicating otherwise.
Finally, I gave up and deleted the bastard Toast altogether. Unfortunately, there are no other decent DVD-burning applications for the Mac. The alternatives either don’t work, or can’t even be installed. I’ve had to resort to trying to use a Windows PC (blech!), while simultaneously attempting to get the job done on the copy of Toast that’s on my ancient, eight-year-old iMac G5—which means that, if it actually works, it might finish the job today…
Ordinary Average Thoughts 