My Source of Inspiration in Poetry, Photography and Design

It’s back to school and the kids are back home from their grandmother’s. And so the house is filled with the booming sounds from jumping on the floor, shoving and yells of “move it!,” “leave me alone,” and “stop.”

Whew, let’s just say I’m glad I had the forethought to have written and schedule blog content for the next two weeks. If you have young, school age children as well, then you also know that ‘back to school’ isn’t just one day. ‘Back to school’ lasts weeks.

So today’s post, I’m featuring  the blending of written and visual content to create what I like to call “phoetry.”  Poetry inspired by and added unto photographs I’ve taken and or pictures designed on Canva.com. Enjoy!

• My husband, in-laws and friends had taken a road trip to Canada for Caribana last year. We took a detour to Niagara Falls, which only half of us was really excited about. The other half had been to Niagara Falls before, so the novelty had worn off.  So it was just me, my brother-in-law and two other women, who went sight-seeing. And I just happened to take this great shot of the falls on my camera phone. Hence the inspiration behind “Legend of the Falls.”

• This picture was designed by me on Canva.com (as is most of the visual content on this site). I was taking the public metro and was immediately struck on how different things looked. It’d been a while since I’d been at that particular station I haven’t been to since I moved. So different that I didn’t realize they’d added a new train line on the route until it pulled in right in front of me. Thus the inspiration behind this two stanza couplet. Unfortunately, it doesn’t rhyme.

The Grind
The days churn by and
I yearn to be a phoenix
freed from the billing #micropoetry #senryu #vss #amwriting pic.twitter.com/NfPbtd4Sto

— lidywilks (@lidywilks) May 27, 2015

• “The Grind” is a senryu inspired as I sat at my cubicle, zoning out. There’s nothing like being in a box and wanting to be free. The fire picture is thanks to GraphicStock.com

• “Resilient” was inspired by another zoning session. I was mulling over thoughts of being the legs of a table or legs of a chair. An analogy that came to me as I’d remembered the scene in the Cinderella retelling movie Ever After. Where Danielle de Barbarac meets Prince Henry  for a second time. Where she is insulted by his arrogance and his low views of Thomas More’s “Utopia.” I’d reasoned that the table is an object of sustenance. While the chair bears the weight of others.

• I wrote this back in college. We were learning the different poetic forms like haiku, sonnets, lai, etc. Their rhyming patterns and meters, and writing our own in our Advanced Poetry Workshop. The limerick was another form of poetry on assignment. I designed this one on Canva.com and tweeted it for St. Patrick’s day.

• As you can see, this poem is not one of my own. “By the Stream” by Paul Laurence Dunbar was a poem I received in my email. All thanks to the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day program. If you haven’t already, sign up to receive a poem a day. And maybe find a poet or two or more to love.

• I’ve recently fell in love with Rita Dove during my 30 Days of Poetry Love project this past April. April is National Poetry Month. And to celebrate I interviewed and posted interviews of 30 poets, one a day. I even created a poet quiz to test your poetry knowledge. Then I found the poem “Trans-” in my email. And like Dunbar’s poem “By the Stream,” I just had to design this on Canva and share it on Tweeter.

Ever wondered the source of inspiration behind a work? And not just a creative piece.  What are you working on now? And what inspired you to do it?