7 Ideas From My Messy Desk

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Howdy, Campers~ Happy Poetry Friday! My poem and the link to PF are below.

We at TeachingAuthors are easing our way back into blogging after a lovely summer s-t-r-e-t-c-h. Ahhhhh.

Our round-robin topic is The View From Our Desks.
Bobbi started us out from her new home, which she and her cat, Comma, are just moving into. She posted a poem aptly titled, The View From the Window by R.S. Thomas; Carmela's view is itinerant, beginning with her Creativity Camp, followed up with conference presentations (Carmela deserves a vacation!); Esther gave us stunning out-the-window views from her Chicago office; JoAnn is spending the summer writing poetry in her outside office, and Carla shares the long view: both the view from her office window...and also what she's thinking as she edits her upcoming book.

I've titled this post, "7 Ideas From My Messy Desk" because I've read that including numbers in a blog title attracts attention. (For you, dear readers, there really are seven ideas at the end.)

You and I know we can prove anything with sources from the internet, (which is why I use Snopes.com to check who actually said a quote, among other things)...and (surprise!) I've found a post which cites several studies indicating that a messy desk actually spurs creativity. Just the kind of study I love!

And...my desk is messy--or at least the side table is. I was going to clean up my office up for you...but why pretend?

I try to keep my desk itself clear, but on my side table you'll see:

• the aftermath of our annual block party (I want to print up new signs for next year before I put them away); 
• books I'm going through for my revised Writing Picture Books for Children class this fall; 
• two books my father loved by Tagore, which he discovered in India during WWII that I've been meaning to read for decades; 
• my handout, "Social Change Through Every Day Actions" from my presentation at the International Literacy Association's conference in Orlando two weeks ago; 
• a pile of 50-year-old letters from my father; 
• books and notes from my trips to New Zealand and Japan this spring;
• a bunch of nearly unreadable ideas jotted down in the middle of the night.

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Not neat. But an office I would have died for when I was a teenager.
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Here are two poems on today's topic:

MY DESK 1.
by April Halprin Wayland

If you come by
I'll clean it up

but if you don't

I won't.

MY DESK 2.
by April Halprin Wayland

My desk's a sorcerer's printing press,
a paper field
of don't-forgets.

Memos piled in mountain peaks.
Scrawled ideas
in ancient Greek.

Each brilliant message?
Lost in space.
Possibly a sign of grace. 

poems (c) April Halprin Wayland 2017. all rights reserved.

Do you ever write notes to yourself at night...brilliant ideas that are sure to rock the literary world...and when you wake up, they're either utterly incomprehensible, absurd or worse, ho-hum? Here's seven from the last few weeks:

1. Never say no to a rubber band; 
2. "I'm not shouting!" she shouts; 
3. a friend wrote to me: "so glad the conf was good and...that you had fun at the Penguin dinner. (which sounds like the start of a poem)"; 
4. per Nancy Bo Flood: Some languages have no tenses; so they can't talk about the past or future; 
5. Two kids: one named Smoke, one named Mirrors;
6. from A.Word.A.Day: "Natalie came home from school excited and worried, announcing, “Laura was hit by the school bus and had a conclusion!”;
7. Mr. Tongue Goes to the Unemployment Office (I have no idea what I was thinking, but I'm still laughing!)

I'd love to read ideas you've jotted down late at night!

Thank you, Donna, at Mainely Write for hosting Poetry Friday today!

 posted with the help of Monkey (can you find him in the picture of my office, above?) and Eli, who is pictured in his uncluttered corner office: