Paint Chip Poetry: Playing with Poetry #playingwithpoetryNPM 13/30

This month, I’m tagging along with ChristieMargaretJoneMary Lee, and other writers to play with poetry for National Poetry Writing Month. I’ll be creating poems using haikubes, metaphor dice, magnet poetry, paint chips and anything else that catches my fancy.

I haven’t had a lot of success so far with the haikubes, so I decided to try writing haiku from paint chips. I have mostly been working with single-color paint chips, so today I added a constraint: I needed to use all of the colors on a multi-color paint card in the haiku. I chose three cards at random. There weren’t always a lot of extra syllables to play with once the paint chip names were incorporated. Paint color names are in bold.

blue hydrangea blooms
against the clear summer sky
soft rococo blue

silent fog conceals
my heart, an artichoke leaf
fresh thyme green thistle

cat’s eye poetry
not yellow or gold: green grape,
lemon grass, spring leaf




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6 responses to “Paint Chip Poetry: Playing with Poetry #playingwithpoetryNPM 13/30”

  1. margaretsmn Avatar
    margaretsmn

    I love how paint chip color names push you to a new way of looking at things. My heart, an artichoke leaf.

    1. Elisabeth Ellington Avatar

      That artichoke leaf really stumped me. I spent a LONG time trying to work a haiku about an artichoke field but I just couldn’t make it work. So I moved to metaphor, and that did help. At least I was able to write something I could be contentish with!

  2. godcoffeedogcow Avatar
    godcoffeedogcow

    Interesting! I had never thought about using paint chips, and I am Googling haikubes now… I noticed in your notes you wrote, “don’t say yellow gold.” May I ask why not? Thank you!

    1. Elisabeth Ellington Avatar

      That was a first draft line that I discarded in favor of the recrafted second line. The haikubes are very cool but not working that well for me, though I LOVE my metaphor dice!

  3. Juliana Ellington Avatar
    Juliana Ellington

    Love the haiku about your cats’ eye colors.

    1. Elisabeth Ellington Avatar

      Fergus’s eyes could be any of those colors!! My cats mostly have yellow and gold eyes, but Fergus has quite green eyes!

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