It is National Poetry Month in both Canada and the US. Judy Reeves, one of our IAJW Journal Council members, created an inspiring Book Spine Poem. I had never heard of a Book Spine Poem and was immediately drawn to it.
I wanted to create one too and thought it would be fun to invite others in our journaling community to play with poetry in this way too!
Try this: Simply take a look at your books and pick out 6 of them to stack together, allowing the titles of the books to form the lines of your poem.
Feel welcome to offer an image of your own Book Spine Poem or simply write it out and share it in the comments below. I look forward to reading your creations.
Here is Judy Reeves’ Book Spine Poem…
Book Spine Poem by Amy Muscoplat, IAJW Member
Book Spine Poem by Deborah Hamilton, IAJW Member
Create your own Book Spine Poem and feel welcome to share it in the comments below…
Happy creating.
Soooo creative and a total delight to receive. Many thanks, Linda
Thanks for reading and for your comment. It really is such a fun and creative way to play with making a poem!
Love this fun exercise!
Hi, Laura, nice to see you here. This could be fun to do with the soulful business books on our shelves :)
Since I’m a Kindle Gal, I don’t have a photo, but I absolutely loved creating this poem. Thanks for sharing the idea!
Journey to the heart
Upstream
The direction of the wind.
Ecstasy is necessary
A deep breath of life
Outrageous openness
A fierce heart.
The power is within you
Untamed.
The universe has your back.
Jump and your life will appear.
Hi Rosemary, I am glad you liked it! I love your poem. Thanks for sharing your creation. We are reading some of the same books :)
State of Neither (The Still Point)
Neither attracted nor repelled
Neither distracted nor compelled.
Nothing redacted
nor over-filled.
Enough is enough, precisely so!
No strings attached.
No tracks to trick one
No tricks to trap one.
Neither here nor there
Yet this is where
I am complete.
Thanks, Tim. This is a fabulous poem.
6 BOOKS = ONE BOOK SPINE POEM. by Gayle Church, Ontario Canada
The Art of Possibility
Women Writing and Soul Making
Move into Life
Drinking from the River of Life
Writing as a Path to Awakening
Tracking Wonder
Great books with wonderful knowledge. Enjoyed them all.
Hi Gayle, I love your poem, thanks for sharing. I also see some new books to add to my reading list! (Women Writing and Soul Making sounds interesting).
Wonderful sharing to organizing books; on shelf, off shelf wherever books may live, may it be with a reading heart, learning, growing from words flowing heart to page, page to heart inspirationally writing, imaginatively uniting, poetically inviting.
The Soul of RUMI
Journey to the HEART
Pilgrim of LOVE
Freeing the Body, Freeing the MIND
Anatomy of SPIRIT
The Tree of ENLIGHTENMENT
Living your YOGA
In my own WORDS ✍️
NAMASTE 💚
This is beautiful, Denise. Thank you. Namaste.
Loved doing this. The books came to mind instantly.
three women
Girl, Woman, Other
thinking fast and slow
open
at home in the world
Authors: Lisa Taddeo, Bernardine Evaristo, Daniel Kahneman, Andre Agassi, Joyce Maynard
Hi Michelle, so great to see your voice and words here. I love your poem! I am going to look up some of these books too. Thanks for listing the authors. See you in a member event soon. Thank you for all of your wonderful presence and participation in our monthly member events. I always appreciate seeing you.
Hi Lynda and all the poets.
What fun! I first read about Book Spine Poems a couple of National Poetry Months ago and have pulled many, many books off my shelves and stacked them and restacked them. (Revising is not as easy when you’re moving entire books around, rather than just words or sentences!) I’m delighted to share the fun and appreciate you sharing it with our lively and creative journal writing community. Your poem is beautiful!
Hi Judy, I was looking at books on my shelves in my office all day today and making book spine poems in my head :)
Thank you, Lynda and Judy, for this fun poetry practice.
I loved doing this!
The Year of Magical Thinking
Advice for future corpses,
who will cry when you die?
Final gifts
being mortal
How to go on when someone you love dies
A Grateful Heart
Authors: Joan Didion, Sallie Tisdale, Robin Sharma, Maggie Callanan & Patricia Kelley, Atul Gawande, Therese A. Rando, M.J. Ryan (ed.)
Hi Jennifer, what a powerful poem! Thanks for sharing and for creating it.
Linda, is the idea to choose the books purposely, trying to create a sensical poem, or just randomly pull them and then see what forms?
Tx!
Lynn
Hi Lynn, I am checking with Judy Reeves as I just followed her lead. Great question and I’ll get back to you.
Hi Lynn, here is the response I got from Judy, hope it helps and happy creating! …
This is an interesting question. I learned how to create book spine poems one National Poetry Month several years ago and just imitated the style. I just pulled a good number of books off the shelves that evoked a response from me. Then stacked and restacked them until I felt satisfied with the poem. (Revising is easier when writing by hand than when stacking books.)
The book titles I chose all spoke to an idea or theme. But I suppose a poet could just pull random books and through intuition or some kind of poetic mojo create a poem that held together.
Playing with it is the part I like. The process, anyway we want to do it. As Rilke told us, “One can do anything.”
Hope this answers the question.
Best
Judy
Linda, interesting: I found a book called Spine Poems!
https://www.amazon.com/Spine-Poems-Eclectic-Collection-Lovers/dp/0063208229/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Spine+poems&qid=1682136713&sr=8-1
Lynn
Interesting!! Thanks for sharing :)
Lynda Monk, what a fun article! Lynn D. Morrissey, thank you for sharing!
This was incredibly fun.
Here is my poem:
in this very life
journeys into emptiness
writing from the body
soul says
technically, it’s not my fault
Have fun fellow writers! Beth
This was incredibly fun and here is my poem:
in this very life
journeys into emptiness
writing from the body
soul says
technically, it’s not my fault
Have fun, fellow writers! Beth
I love your poem, Beth!! ❤️
Jo Ann K. – I used only 5 books. Here is my book spine poetry:
Of this Earth
The heart of a woman
Awakening from grief
In a dark wood,
The Grass is Singing.
This is a gorgeous poem, Jo Ann! Thank you so much for sharing it.
Here’s my book spine poem using 5 book titles”
Of This Earth,
The Heart of a Woman
Awakening from Grief
In a Dark Wood,
The Grass is Singing
This was a wonderful exercise. Loved it! My book spine poem is:
We are the Power of God
Master the Mind and be a Mastermind
Learn to love yourself
A Shift within
Discover your True North
Excuse me, your life is waiting
Beautiful, Neshni! Thanks for playing and sharing. These are all such empowering and nourishing book titles!
All About Love
Kindred
My Grandmother’s Hands
Hands That Heal
Seven Thousand Ways to Listen
Start Where You Are
Hi Angleen, thanks for sharing your nourishing poem – it feels infused with love and “hands that heal.”
Ok, Ms. Lynda, finally getting back to you! I really appreciated Judy’s comments, and that there is no rule for Spine Poems. Of course, in “anything journal,” there would not be! And this poetry form, after all, is not a sonnet, e.g., where specific rules apply. So I decided to pick a stack of books (in the order in which they happened to be stacked) from atop my kitchen table, where I read in the mornings. Actually I do everything here, so we eat on a big table in the family room! :-)I digress!
Here is my stack, and I loved the poem the spines formed. Because two of the books were on loan from the library, I don’t have them here to photograph. Here’s the stack:
Beauty Chasers
Veneer
Beautiful People Don’t Just Happen
Live Hopefully
Deeper
Your Future Self Will Thank You
On the surface, this may not make sense to you or your readers, but it spoke volumes to me. But I went a step further, and completely fleshed this out into a long poem which I just presented to my mother today for her 93rd birthday! She loved it. I titled the poem, Beauty Chasers, and “bolded” each of the titles within the poem so she could easily detect them. I can’t tell you how enjoyable this exercise was, and for me, I took it to the next level of creating a poem I never would have otherwise, had it not been for the “spine prompts”!
Thanks so much for this delightful exercise in creativity!
Lynn
Hi Lynn, your note warms my heart. How special that you gifted a poem to your mother! To the power of words to touch hearts and spread creativity from one heart to another.
Linda, you’re so right.! There is no gift like the gift of words, especially for one you love as much as I do my mother. While we’re on the poetry subject, I’d add that I wrote one of Kay Adams’s famous “alpha” poems for Mother. She loved it. I used her full name as the acrostic for her 90th b/day, and framed it. I told dear Kay recently that I have given framed alphas numerous times for b/days, memorials, graduations, weddings, etc. They are nearly always rec’d w/ tears and always, always w/ great gratitude and overwhelming joy! I’ve Kay to thank for the idea, though my husband said she’s accruing a bill. He’s going to charge *her* for the fancy frames! ;) Perhaps this would be a topic for your blog as well.
Have a lovely Memorial-Day weekend.
Lynn xo