Magnet poetry highlights
About a year ago, my roommate Joanne and I picked up a magnet poetry set for our fridge. The limitations of the form are freeing: you only get so many words, so figure out how to arrange them. Here are some of my favorites.
If you're considering your own magnet poetry set, I'll warn you: there are wrong ways to arrange the unused words on the fridge. Totally random is definitely wrong, it becomes too difficult to find words even when you know exactly what you're looking for. Alphabetical is also wrong in exactly the way that reading the dictionary cover-to-cover is wrong.
Pretty quickly, we settled on the layout shown in the photo below (click to expand).
Words are vaguely categorized and placed based on part-of-speech usage. So if you're looking for a preposition, those live towards the upper-right; pronouns towards the bottom-center; nouns at the top-left, noun-or-verbs (like "crush") below them, verbs below them; and so on. Within each group, words are unorganized - just stare at the small pile and see what sticks out. Finally, the large empty space in the center is where the actual poems go.
Thanks Joanne, and apartment visitors, for your artistic contributions to our fridge. More to come!