Word Bird

Erin Keane is now the second person to have written a poem using the Virginia Quarterly Review's list of their ten most common titles. Anyone else have something to share? I really do hope more people try to take up this challenge. It goes to show you that no word should be excluded from a poem. If someone says you should never use a specific word because it's a cliché or on the other hand not "poetic" enough, flip them the bird and give it a go. You might be surprised by what you come up with.

From VQR:

In response to our publishing the ten most common titles of work submitted to us, two folks have managed to use all of those titles in poems of their own. Greg Santos kicked it off, and Erin Keane followed up with one of her own.

Read Erin Keane's piece here.

With that in mind, here is a list of words (in no particular order) that I've been told to never use in poetry:

1. Love
2. God
3. Soft
4. Gentle
5. Life
6. Good
7. Bad
8. Beautiful
9. Alone
10. Moon

These words have a tendency to be vague abstractions or overused, no thanks to bad greeting cards and the like, but now I'm tempted to sneak many of these words into my regular work or perhaps write a poem using all of them. Anyone else up for the challenge?