While ornithologists may disagree with me, there is nothing particularly notable about the pewit, also known as the Northern lapwing, the green plover, or as Vanellus vanellus, to have earned it to a spot on our blog. It's a lovely bird to be sure. While neither as fearsome as a raptor nor elegant as a heron, a pewit's would surely look at home on the crest of a noble Eurasian family, or on the shield of a Medieval knight.

V. vanellus is a migratory bird, its arrival in the low countries signaling the onset of spring. Its eggs, mottled and small, which it lays in open fields, have been considered a delicacy my the aristocracy of Europe. The birds defend their eggs bitterly, and are known to feign injury to lure would-be predators away from their nests.

The word "pewit" is personally significant not because of its definition, but because of its daffynition. Daffynitions are a simple sort of pun - a proposed definition of a word based on the words pronunciation rather than its actual definition. Coffee, for example, is the person on whom one coughs. A flatulence is an emergency vehicle that picks someone up who has been run over by a steamroller.

As for the pewit, a "pewit" is somebody who composes "pewitry". If you're reading this pewitry blog, I hazard to guess that you, yourself, might be a pewit.


Prompt:

Chances are, you've come up with daffynitions yourself, perhaps as a child, plucking a dandelion and thinking of large cats in waistcoats. Take some time for levity this week. Take some time for puns. Compose some daffynitions of your own, and if you come up with some good ones, share them with us here at Floodmark!

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark

Banner image courtesy of Wikipedia

Wallace Stevens did not concern himself solely with the content of his poetry, nor its emotional impact, but also with how it sounds. This concern shaped Stevens' word choice – not only for meaning, but also for sound – and led him to invent remarkable words, onomatopoeias mostly, for use in his poetry. One such word is "Rattapallax", which appears only in his 1922 poem, “Frogs Eat Butterflies, Snakes Eat Frogs, Hogs Eat Snakes, Men Eat Hogs”:

It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,

Tugging at banks, until they seemed

Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,

The breath of turgid summer, and

Heavy with thunder's rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted

This field, and tended it awhile,

Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days,

Grotesque with this nosing in banks,

This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,

As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves

While they went seaward to the sea-mouths. 

"Rattapallax" doesn't have a dictionary definition, nor does it need one. We understand it solely by its sound. It is the sound, the sensation, and the feeling of thunder. The poem leads us to understand rattapallax in contrast to somnolence. Rattapallax is full of energy; it has an alert quality, yet a quintessential summer storm will have both qualities – both somnolence and rattapallax.

Prompt:
Is there are feeling you can't quite capture? A sensation you don't quite have a word for? Make one up! Work it into your works the way Stevens uses "rattapallax" or Hobbes uses "snorky", "brambish," and "brunky". Share your results with Floodmark!

Image courtesy of Bill Watterson, via Arnold Zwicky

Read more from Vernon Meidlinger-Chin on Floodmark
Banner image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

If you were in the continental United States on August 21st, and if you looked skyward during the day, would would have been greeting by a “once in a lifetime” sight: the new moon, passing over the face of the sun, casting a chilling and uncanny shadow over the face of the Earth 

What you have witnessed is a solar eclipse. The great wolf has swallowed the sun! The serpent of days has done battle with the gods! The end of days is upon us! 

Photo courtesy of NASA

Rather, the eclipse is the result of a Syzygy, the conjunction of three celestial bodies in a line. In the case of the 2017 solar eclipse, the Earth, Sun, and Moon moved into syzygy with the Moon in the middle. In the case of a lunar eclipse, the Earth would take the center position in the syzygy, casting its shadow on the face of the full moon.

Photo courtesy of The Los Angeles Times

Syzygies do not happen solely in the Sun-Earth-Moon system though. From time to time, if you observe the sky carefully, you might be treated to a syzygy of multiple bright planets with Earth. The results are always lovely to observe, and if your interests include astrology as well as astronomy, let us at Floodmark know what it means for these planets to be “aligned”!

Prompt:

Consider chance encounters in your life that might not necessarily occur between celestial objects. Have you ever been in syzygy with other people? Consider the mythologies that surround astronomical events. What sort of folklore surrounds eclipses and planetary alignments? And if you witnessed the 2017 solar eclipse over North America, what did you experience? Put pen to paper, and as always, we at Floodmark would love to hear from you!

Read more from Vernon Meidlinger-Chin on Floodmark

Sisyphus, king of Corinth, was known to be the craftiest of mortal men. For his scheming and his dishonesty, the Gods condemned him to the most elegantly sadistic form of punishment in all the great underworld. Sisyphus was condemned to roll a massive boulder to the top of a steep hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom ever time he neared the summit, over and over again for all eternity.

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The myth of Sisyphus gives us the fantastic adjective “Sisyphean”, a word that conveys the futility and difficulty of a seemingly endless task. The conclusion, made by Albert Camus in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that “we must imagine Sisyphus happy”, has roughly synonymized with the Sisyphean with the absurd and associated the labor of Sisyphus with the absurdity of human life. The protagonists of Franz Kafka, struggling endlessly with vast and incomprehensible bureaucracy, can be said to live Sisyphean lives. The Trix rabbit, it his endless quest to try a little bite of Trix cereal even though, “Trix are for kids,” is a tragic figure of Sisyphean proportions.

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“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a rabbit’s heart. One must imagine Trix happy” – Albert Camus, “The Myth of Trix” (slightly altered).

Prompt: 

We’ve all undergone experiences that have felt, in some way, Sisyphean. If you’re a writer, the process of writing and editing, revising and rewriting, can feel endless and futile and impossible. Write about such an experience, either your real or imagined. How does associating such a labor with a Greek myth effect how you write your piece? Does Camus’ association with the absurdity of life inform your writing? 

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.

Heat sand hot enough, and you get glass. If you are a glassmaker, you can do this in a kiln. If you are a harbinger of extinction, you can do this with a meteor strike. And if you are J. Robert Oppenheimer, you can do this with a nuclear blast.

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Meet trinitite, a rare, slightly radioactive glass formed when the fireball of a nuclear bomb draws sand up into itself, melts the particles together, and rains molten glass onto the ground below it.

The name “trinitite” derives from the name of the nuclear test site where it was first observed – Trinity, the first atomic test in human history. The site gets its name from nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s love of the poetry of John Donne. “Batter my heart, three person'd God,” Donne wrote, and, centuries later, nuclear history was made.

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Note the shoes worn by Oppenheimer and his crew in the picture; they are specially designed so as not to track trinitite away from the test site.

Prompt: 

You could write a lifetime worth of poetry and never have to use the word trinitite, but consider the way poetry and science and world power come together in this word. There is a certain beauty to the code name of the first nuclear test. Members of the Manhattan project recognized the singular significance of their work, and chose associated words deliberately. So rather than give you a real prompt this time, may I just wish that the words you chose be likewise deliberate and evocative. 

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.

AND THE WORD OF THE WEEK IS....

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Solipsism is attractive for a few reasons. First, it sounds lovely. And it looks lovely. So it carries a certain nice aesthetic. Second, the sum of the philosophy can be explained as: "I am the only mind which exists". Which is a pretty interesting. The idea that existence is everything that I experience is a fascinating lens to see your poetry through.

Here's a nice handwritten definition I found:

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The Prompt

Don't use the word solipsism in your poem. (You can use it in your title if you have to.) Simply write as if you are the middle of the universe. Everything resolves around you -- the only things that exist are filtered through your senses. If you are the sun, let all your imagery branch out from you.

Definition 

a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung.

via Merriam-Webster.

Origin

Sylvia Wright misheard a lyric in the traditional 17th-century ballad "The Earl of Murray" when she was a child, and loved her romanticized version so much she believed it more.

The correct line is: "And laid him on the green".

The line Wright heard is: "And Lady Mondegreen". 

In 1950, she wrote an essay about it and coined the term "mondegreen" for words or phrases that come from such mixups and mishearings. 

Prompt

1. Use the phrase "[s/he] laid him on the green" in a poem. Put it smack in the middle of the poem and fill in the rest around it. You could try to approach it like a mind-map: put that line in the middle and let all other lines be offshoots that frame it. 

2. Brainstorm  your own mondegreens. Try to make a list of the original phrases and the mondegreen that came from your mixup. If you don't have any, let your mind wander and make some creative leaps and invent your own. Sprinkle them into your poetry or write a poem devoted entirely to mondegreens if you're feeling ambitious. 

It's that time again: WORD. NERD. WEDNESDAY. 

Where we present you with a lovely word and you try to use it in your writing. If this one doesn't do it for ya, we have a bazillion more word prompts you can choose from. (But seriously there are almost 50 words to choose from. Take your pick.)

This week's word? 

(photo cred to: source)

Fluorescence, as defined by Merriam-Webster: 

luminescence that is caused by the absorption of radiation at one wavelength followed by nearly immediate reradiation usually at a different wavelength and that ceases almost at once when the incident radiation stops

Well, that's a mouthful. Essentially, shit that glows in the dark. When it glows naturally, it's called "bioluminescence". Vieques Bioluminescent Bay, pictured above, is a great example. Although it's not magic (usually it's something much, much less glamorous), us poets sitting in chilly Chicago can pretend it is. 

The Prompt

Today we're going to do an acrostic writing prompt. Not sure what that is? We've covered it for you here. Essentially, it's going old school. Each line starts with a letter in "Fluorescence". I like to free write on each letter until I get the lines I like. OR, if I'm feeling unfocused but still want to write something, I'll let my brain churn out lines as I go and worry about making it make sense later. 

Can you believe its Wednesday already? Me either. But a new Wednesday means a new word to inspire the rest of your week! And boy, oh boy, do I have a treat for you today.

Definition: thin, supple, and graceful.

Fun fact: when I tried to type "lissome" on my phone it autocorrected to "kiss one". Maybe it's a sign.  Or maybe my phone has an extremely limited vocabulary. Either way, I liked the musicality and the words "lissome" and "kiss" in the same context. After all, isn't grace akin to kissing the sky? 

The Prompt

Today, let's do some free association to work on our ear for music. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Write lissome at the top. Now write the next work that pops into your head to start the list. Then another then another. 
For example, mine starts like this: 

lissome

kiss one
missed
wished
swished
fish
wrist
mist
lift

And so on and so forth. Try to keep at it for about 5 minutes, and let your brain wander to the next sound freely. Go with it. When you're done, select 10 words -- the 10 best words or the 10 easiest words to use or the 10 most musical words. However you want to judge it is fine. Use these words in your next poem.

Read more of Alexandria's work.

Offing (n): the more distant part of the sea seen from the shore.

Definition source.

Well, that's lovely. So lovely that I gave the definition away immediately. Everyone can close their eyes and see the word offing. It's one of those words that you discover accidentally, that you stumble on one day while browsing through a dictionary or on the Internet. You feel a little dollop of satisfaction spread through you: there's a word for this after all.  

Offing is used in an equally satisfactory idiom:

in the offing,
(a) at a distance but within sight.
(b) in the projected future; likely to happen:
A wedding is in the offing.

The Prompt

Here's the thing about an offing: you will never reach it, even if you row, row, row your boat all the way to the horizon. It's something only seen. In a way, you need to have faith it exists when you're not looking directly at it. 

What spaces in your life exist only when you look at them? Better still: what spaces exist only when you name them? 

So, you're standing on the beach with all these deep thoughts winding their way through your head. Carving thought canyons and trickling down into your fingertips. There's sand between your toes. (Let's be honest, there's sand everywhere.) The sun is rising. The sea stretches at your feet, reaching a little farther each time. You look from the minutia of sand and stone and silt, sporadic sea shells and rhythmic ripples, outward to the horizon. You gaze into the offing. 

Write about what happens next. 

Do you dive in, trying to get a closer look? Do you suddenly remember all the unnamed spaces in your everyday life? Do you think of a person? And so on, and so forth. 

Happy writing, Word Nerds. 

Read more posts by Alexandria.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has inspired me once again! And this time, we have a very interesting element to introduce: a video definition. If this doesn't get your writing going, I don't know what will. We wander through our lives, in and out of storylines until all our wandering becomes weaving. Intentional, purposeful. Every step you take pulls your thread through the fabric of the world. There's a word for it. 

I present to you: SONDER. 

The Prompt

Go sit somewhere. Watch the people go by. Choose 3 or 4 of them. Embrace sonder by giving each of them a storyline in which you are the extra, the passerby. What role you do you play? Are you noticed? What might you bear witness to? Contain your stories to 500 words or less. Eventually, try to whittle down your little stories until they resemble prose poems. You'll either have solid flash fiction or a solid prose poem -- both a solid investment of your time. 

Happy writing!

Some words make us happy (PUPPIES), some words make us cringe (*moist*), and some words make us daydream (vellichor).

And what does vellichor mean, you may ask? Let's check The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: 

This word gives me intense feelings. Especially this definition -- which is admittedly much more flowery than "the strange wistfulness of used bookshops". (Though that one too, is nice in its own right.) Now that we've got the poetry pumping through your veins, let's write!

The Prompt(s)

1. Write an acrostic poem with the word 'vellichor.' (Not sure what an acrostic poem is? We've written up a handy guide for you.) Think of your lines as stacks and stacks of stories, layers of nostalgia, in keeping with the meaning of the word. 

2. Write a story about a bookstore in 200 words. Now write it over again as a poem in whatever form you'd like. 

Happy Wednesday? Ready for the word of the day? I knew you would be.

Word of the Day: Phosphenes

(image source)

Do you know what it means? Hint: it's eye-related. And you've experienced it before. Maybe not too long ago if you've been pulling late nights like yours truly. One of the best things about these posts (for me, and hopefully for you as well!) is discovering words for things you experience every day. What a crazy world we live in -- you can go your whole life and suddenly find a word that brings something totally mundane back into focus. It's our job as poets to harness these moments and put them to work.

Via a blog on Tumblr -- but I can't find the link. :(

The Prompt

Rub your eyes. See some stars. Now write them into random constellations and meaningful sentences. If you're feeling really feisty, try using the word in a poem today. 

***

Are you looking for more words to inspire your writing? 

Check out all of our Word Nerd Wednesday posts here.

It's that time again: Word Nerd Wednesday! Get ready for a new word-gem for your word-hoard. (Beowulf reference all the way.)

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Today's word: Somnambulist. 

Definition: a person who walks about in his or her sleep; a sleepwalker.

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The Prompt

Imagine you're walking at night. Where are you walking? Start there: write down where you are. Look at the big picture, and then make note of the minutia in your dreamscape. 

Of course, you're asleep. But do you realize you're asleep? What do you see before you wake up? How do you wake up -- slowly or all at once? What's the transition like between sleeping and waking? Is there a twilight area? Take this experience in and consider the in-between areas that fall between the cracks of your consciousness. 

Ready to hear about this week's word? I'm excited for two reasons. Reason # 1: 

CATZ OMG I LOVE THEM

Yep. Reason #2: I think this has some great poetic potential. If you use this word correctly in a poem, you're dialing it up to 11 and everyone will know it. So listen up!
Here are the details:

So, I think they mean texturally. (Think like the cat's eye stone.) You can read more about the effect and definition over here. So your goal? Use this word (casually) within a poem --- in such a way that the reader can get the general imagery that you're going for.  Ready, set, GO!

Gosh, don't you just love Wednesdays? 

Chances are you're shaking your heads "NO" and backing away slowly.

Because who the hell loves Wednesdays, or HUMP DAY, if you will? It's the awkward middle point of the week where you can't quite be excited for Friday yet because it's so far away. Oh, and you're also panicked because all the stuff you were putting off until "the end of the week" is suddenly waaaaay too close for comfort. So yeah, Wednesdays suck.

That's why we made Word Nerd Wednesday. (Well. That, and alliteration.) So put aside your Wednesday blues and get ready for a brilliant new word!

The definition makes it sound a little creepier than necessary. But the proof is in the pudding, as they say. "Umbra" means "shadow" and "-phile" means "lover". So, an "intense interest" is about right. 

You might have heard there was recently a blood moon AND a solar eclipse. That's how this word came to my attention. If you missed out on seeing the blood moon / eclipse, here are some sweet photos to give you an idea why someone might be an umbraphile:

Pretty cool, right? So get to work! Write a poem titled "umbraphile", or just aim to use the word once in a poem you're currently working on. You can get some really awesome figurative language from this word if you gave it a serious go, so maybe try your hand at free writing until something clicks.