Tools and Inspiration

Psalm 3 was a rhyming couplet. The design was inspired by Gustav Klimt paintings and a page from a magazine advertising needlepoint pillows based on Klimt's painting. I am always looking at magazines, books, surfing the Internet for visual inspiration. The seeds of ideas are really everywhere you look. I have file folders filled with ideas to bounce off of. When I am writing the poems I use my laptop and go to the online thesaurus, and the online rhyming dictionary. With those 2 sites at my fingertips it makes it easy, fun and a wonderful learning experience to go through the Psalms and play with the concepts, words and ideas. I end up with new insights and a deeper understanding of each Psalm and it's personal application to my own life.
I am using Writing Simple Poems by Homes and Moulton and Favorite Poetry Lessons by Paul B. Janeczko to learn about the different forms of poetry. I was fearful of the whole idea of rhyming but once I started and had the help of the internet sites it was not nearly as difficult as I had thought it would be. From Janeczko book:

"I really do think of form as a safe place... The form of a poem delivers what it promises. there are boundaries, and consequently you're free. Writing free verse is much much more difficult. The decision making interferes with the flow of my art. -Molly Peacock"

"Working in rhyme, you don't absolutely control the direction your poem is heading in. At times, you yearn to say something, but the infernal rhymes won't let you. You're like someone crossing a river on stepping stones, obliged to walk where the stones permit. You struggle to keep your balance, while at the same time trying to go where you want to go. Often in writing a rhyming poem, you end up where you didn't expect. -X. J. Kennedy"

Both of these quotes help to capture the ideas why it is such a wonderful devotional tool to take a part of God's word and put it into your own words and craft it into a particular form of poetry. The point for me is not great poetry but the fact that as I struggle, play, think, meditate on the words, meaning and ideas I am constantly going deeper into what the Psalm is saying directly to me and how do I apply it to my own life.