I Collect Words

I'm not going to reveal that to you, she said.

My nine-year-old could just have easily replied, I'm not going to *tell* you. But somehow she's become a collector of words, and she isn't shy about using them.

In a marvelous little book called Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words, Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge encourages us to create 'wordpools', collections of words we find here and there, to help 'free us to follow the words and write poems.' This is apt advice not only for the would-be poet but for the writer in general.

Words, after all, are like faces... they look you in the eye or avoid your gaze, smile or frown, raise eyebrows in surprise or blink back tears. They are distinct, arresting, memorable, except when we use the same ones over and over. Not that we can't tell a good story using common words (and sometimes too many unique words are distracting). But consider the difference between...

sit, perch, settle, sprawl

or

see, observe, spy, peek, glimpse, view, squint

or

red, crimson, vermilion, scarlet, cranberry

This week I invite you to begin a word pool. On your fridge, in a box with note cards, in a journal or even on the sidebar of your blog. Collect words from conversations, the dictionary, street signs; collect words for their sounds, even if they are words you coin (swizzle, swazzle, swittle). If you're feeling adventurous, you might stir those words into a poem or vignette that begins, middles or ends with the phrase 'I am' (choose a sound, a song, an animal, a number, a food, a tree, a piece of furniture, whatever, says Wooldridge) and see what your words reveal.

'Bottled'

I am fizzle
fazzle pizazz,
snap crackle...
slide your hand
past my red belt
take me by the
ribbed neck
set teeth on edge
flick fluted tin
and, pop!

Photo by Gail Nadeau. Used with permission.