Renee Emerson

One of the things I love most about writing is gathering words.

I’ve always been bookish, loving to read, loving the dips and turns of language, and its always there that I find my poems. I keep a notebook–I’m not one that saves my diaries, writing very prettily in them and lining them up along the bookshelf to count the years–I keep a notebook with daily to-do lists in the front, a weekly menu in the middle, project list somewhere toward the end, and my scrawling first-drafts, false-starts and word-lists at the end.

I love creating word lists. Its where my poems almost always start, unless they just “come to me” all of a sudden, like a penny dropped in a fountain. I have no rhyme or reason for why a word makes it onto one of my lists–I hear it, or, more often, read it, and immediately think “Poetry!” and scramble to jot it down.

Here is the word list where I got a recent poem, and you are welcome to use it too if you would like, just promise you’ll email it to me or post it here below–I’d be interested to see how different our poems would be, two poems from the same word list can still be very vastly different!


Word List 11/12
mesh
message
gauze
scroll
secret
cluster
jar
closed
dissatisfaction
ships
paper