magneticpoetry.com

...to get letters like this:

"No questions. Just a note of appreciation. From the moment the box arrived, 
my granddaughters, ages 13 and 11, became oblivious to their electronic 
devices, and spent the next three hours composing, creating, and rhyming. 
All to the soundtrack of non-stop giggles and shrieks of delight.  

Along with the two easels I purchased, the girls raided the kitchen for 
every cookie sheet, lined them up down the length of the hall way, and are 
working on an 'epic novel'. 

I'll definitely be back for more."  

-Marilyn Atkinson

I'm a huge hockey fan, and like many hockey-loving Minnesotans I look forward each year to the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament. There's nothing like it anywhere in this country, or in the world, as far as I know. Tens of thousands of people gather to watch the boys play (and a whole lot of people also come to watch the more recently added girls' tournament). It's an amazing spectacle that you don't have to love hockey to appreciate; I've brought friends who are self-declared sports haters who nevertheless love watching the high school tournament.

Anyway, part of the tradition as of late is the "hockey hair" video that comes out the day after the championship game. It gets literally millions of views on YouTube, and I'm one of the many who wake up on post-tourney Sunday morning and watch it before I even make my coffee. Imagine my delight when this year's video included a cameo Magnetic Poetry appearance! Check it out:

Here at my desk at Magnetic Poetry I've got a couple of metal easels (which we sell, if you want one of your own) and several containers of magnetic tiles from various versions of our kits. The words are all mixed together at this point; I no longer know, for instance, which kit this word "shave" came from. Or this word "mutual" (I'm just looking over at one of my easels here). Are those two words from the same kit? I don't know, and I don't care. I like the fact that all these word tiles have gotten mixed up through me playing with them, by me "stealing" words from various boxes to make a poem more interesting, by me just dumping handfuls of words into jars and forgetting about them until I want to refresh an easel with new words. There's a slow word migration happening here around my desk, and it keeps things random and surprising and sometimes serendipitous. Which is all to say that when I glanced over at the easel this morning, I noticed that the three words "the very promise" were near each other, which suggested something, and led to this, which I think is quite nice.