National Poetry Month: Guest Post From K.A. Holt:
My job as a writer comes in many forms. I write (hopefully) action-packed sci-fi middle grade novels in prose. I write (hopefully) funny and heartfelt contemporary middle grade novels in verse. I write humor essays for a parenting website. Sometimes I pretend to be Geoffrey Chaucer confused by modern technology. I also write as part of Typewriter Rodeo, a quartet of poets who create spontaneous poems on vintage typewriters.
Chronicle Books, 2014.
Each one of these jobs informs the other, bleeding into each other like watercolors. Sometimes you don’t actually want the pink and green to mix, but they do anyway. More times than not, this blending is a good thing.
I often spend my days working on a draft of a verse novel – struggling with character creation and plot development, making sure the imagery is appropriate for the audience, and that I’m showing and not telling the actions of the moment. It’s something I love to do, and it’s something that can be so, so hard. After a day spent beating myself up over clichéd metaphors and half-developed characters, sometimes the best thing to do is to sit in front of the TV and allow myself to go braindead. But often, the best medicine is a Typewriter Rodeo gig.
My fellow poets and I meet at the gig (maybe a wedding or a corporate party) and we set up our typewriters. People don’t know what to expect from us, and we don’t always know what to expect from ourselves, or from them. A person in line will give us a word or a phrase and we will then write a poem – on the spot – and deliver it within minutes. It’s a crazy thing to try to do. And it’s wonderful.
In the next two typed pages, I’ve tried to convey why writing poems on the typewriter is such a fun exercise, and why I think, overall, it can help make anyone a better poet.
K.A. Holt with the Typewriter Rodeo.
Kari Anne Holt is the author of several middle grade novels in verse including HOUSE ARREST, (Chronicle 2015), RHYME SCHEMER (Chronicle, 2014), and BRAINS FOR LUNCH: a zombie novel in haiku. She is also the author of the forthcoming space western RED MOON RISING (Simon & Schuster 2016) and MIKE STELLAR: Nerves of Steel, a nominee for the 2014 Connecticut Library Association Nutmeg Book Award and the 2013 Maud Hart Lovelace Award. Kari is a member of Typewriter Rodeo, a spontaneous poetry-writing quartet based in Austin, TX.
