Piboidmo Day 7 Shape Up With Kat Apel

Shaping a poem the body builder pumps flexes tones and tautens as snip snap snip â€" the gardener prunes and shapes and whoosh! the very clumsy clown colours the sky with brightly bobbing balloons of thought © Kathryn Apel 2010 Playing with words to inspire creativity I write poetry. And I write picture books. And this is a good thing, because poetry and picture books go hand-in-hand… beautifully! If I’m stuck for inspiration or enthusiasm in my picture books, or I’m at that point of doubting that I’ll ever find ‘the’ perfect word (or any words, for that matter)â€"I write poetry. Poetry prompts me to play with words again. We all know the cliché that writers paint pictures with words, but when I’m writing poetry, I get three distinct visual imagesâ€"and they’re all of me! Let me put you in the picture, too… The first is a bit of a joke, because in reality I can’t lift more than a bar of chocolate… BUTâ€"I see myself as The Body Builder toning up by pumping poetry. Composing poetry flexes creativity. It hones vocabulary and encourages wordplay. It pinpoints weaknesses and forces me to focus on specific ‘muscles’. The more poetry I write, the greater my control of my writing musclesâ€"of words. And that is vital when writing picture books! As The Gardener, I