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Poetry Friday : March 10, 2017.
Slice of Life March Challenge. No. 10.

I read the words of Mary Gordon, shared by Maria Popova. So many phrases resonated with me. They danced on the page and played like music in my mind. I wanted to capture them; I wanted to remember them. And so I composed a found poem.

Putting pen to paper
Not just any pen to any paper
I write by hand taking
Great joy in making books manually
Celebrating the glorious,
Grounding physicality of penmanship

Writing by hand is laborious
Labor has virtue
Involves flesh and blood
The thingness of pen and paper
Anchors that remind
We inhabit a corporeal world

The tool itself, a fanciful transporter
Gateway to a different
sense of self
Black enamel, a trim of gold
My pen is elegant,
A fashion statement from a gulag

Subscribe to the cult of the notebook
Notebooks acquired during travels
Square red one for journalism
Hard turquoise for literary criticism
Primary colors for the most uncensored
In the handmade Vermonter, the sentence that shimmers

It is remarkably pleasant
Before failure starts
To use  hand and wrist
Copying in one’s own
delightful penmanship
Marks of those gone before

© 2017 Alice NIne
  –From the words of Mary Gordon shared by Maria Popova on Brain Picking

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