Newspapers, Magazines and TV News

Hello dear readers,

I few months ago I attended this Poetry workshop, writer Diane Raptosh visited one of the Public libraries here in Boise, Idaho. I had such a great time and learned a few new techniques for writing poetry.

One of the techniques she taught consisted on picking any book from the library, read the first or last sentence on the first chapter and write a poem using that sentence. The other technique consisted on writing a poem using a headline from a newspaper.

For my poem I chose the book technique. I went to look for a book written by one of my favorite writers, Paulo Coelho and was lucky enough to find one of his book. You could pick any book but I just thought of him.

What was very interesting for me was that I never thought of using a newspaper as a source of writing poetry. When I write poetry, I usually just write it, without any help, just my notebook, pen, or computer, me and my thoughts. The inspiration comes from situations happening in the world, in my life or things I read in books or things I see on TV but never came from the headlines on a newspapers. I mean, I never read the newspaper purposely thinking that I was going to use a headline to write a poem.

It was amazing to perform this task because when you have a specific piece or title to write about, I think something magical occurs and in my case it was that my creativity just flowed better. Yes, I had to write about something in specific but at the same time it made me think of some other things, made me write with more creativity and developed the story I was telling.

I remember when I was in school, one of the assignments was to read the newspapers for one week and collect the articles that interested us the most and put those all together in a folder and write what we learned or why the article was important to us, why we liked it. At that moment, I wasn't that conscious of my writing like I am now, I just did it because I had to, because it was an assignment for school. Now, I am completely sure, in some way that helped to develop my writing.

Since the workshop, I have to confess, I haven't written much poetry. I've been focused on writing my Memoir but last night watching the news and all the things going on in the world right now, I remembered about this and I made me realize how much I miss, how much I need to write poetry again. So lets do it, but this time what about if besides headlines and TV news, we try it with magazines too. You can try the book technique as well, and see where our poetry takes us.

Enjoy the reading.