One of the things I bought for myself with the gift card to Complete Games and Hobbies that my mom and step-dad gave to me was a Zombie magnetic poetry kit. “Over 200 word magnets of the damned.”
For some reason, from the time I first saw it, I’ve been interested in magnetic poetry. I think it’s to do with seeing a bunch of words scatter haphazardly, letting your eyes roam over them and putting together somewhat coherent stories from the jumble. It’s a nice way to stimulate your creativity.
That said, I still haven’t opened my zombie set. I have it next to me at my computer, which is where it ended up after I bought it. Apart from the fridge and the dishwasher, I don’t have a lot of places to play with a set of word magnets.
Quite a few months back I bought a word magnet app for my iPad called “Word Magnets for iPad” strangely enough. I’m glad it was only a dollar, because it was pretty disappointing. When you launch it, all of the words that are available are scattered on an unpleasant “brushed metal” surface, and it can be a real pain to select the word that you want from the mess. There’s no way to add your own lists of words, no way to edit current words, no way to change the background and no update since it launched in April of last year.
Last night I found a free app for the iPad called “Poetry Magnets“. It also only has one background, but at least it’s not a crappy looking brushed metal. Also, the words that you can choose from appear in a kind of drawer at the bottom that you can scroll through by swiping. It has various categories of words to pick from, including zombies! I was quite happy to see that, so I didn’t waste any time downloading it.
You can mix-and-match between the various categories, although it can be a bit hard to locate which categories contain the words like, “and, but, with, a, if” etc. Some are in “Common”, others in “Extensions” and still others in “Function”. Happily, the developer allows you to double tap on a tile and change the word, and I later found out that if you double tap the surface where there are no tiles, you can create a word tile from scratch.
The only thing you can’t do that I would like to do yet is create your own category sets and change the background.
This has been wordy enough. Here are the first two “poems” that I’ve made with the app so far.
edit: one more…
