Celebration | Invitation

Congratulations Paper Poetry 🎊

✨ Happy One Year Anniversary! ✨

Congratulations to Paper Poetry! 🎊 Woo-hoo! It’s our one-year anniversary! ✨ You’re invited to our virtual party! 💥

A celebration of creativity 💗 Sonnet, twittle, tanka, free verse, stornelli 😍 Sketching, illustration, hand-drawn artistry 💖

Paper Poetry is a community 👫 👭 👬 Small beginnings; now on a trajectory 🚀 Keeping us together, like a family 💞

© Carolyn Hastings

Suntonu Bhadra launched Paper Poetry on August 17, 2020. Little did he know that on the other side of the globe I was tying myself in knots trying to figure out what to write for my first Medium post! I finally pressed the ‘publish’ button on August 21. By celebrating Paper Poetry’s first anniversary, I’m sort of celebrating my own too. 😊

I can’t exactly remember how I came across Paper Poetry. Those early weeks on the platform are lost in the blur of having been jet-propelled up a steep learning curve. Phew-ee, what a ride! 🎢 😅

As the screenshot below shows, Suntonu accepted my request to become a writer for the publication 9 months ago. 🙏

Fast forward to now and, Phew-ee!, what a ride! 🎠 I’ve been a co-editor for the pub since January (how did that happen?)! There’s no getting off the learning curve for me! 😆

Being an editor of a pub means I get to boss people around! Yay!! 😜

No — just kidding! 😘

Being an editor of this pub — Paper Poetry — means I get to connect with a wonderfully creative, generous, like-minded group of writers. That’s you, guys and gals! 💕

I need to thank you all for making Paper Poetry what it is today. A community. A family. One that is growing, evolving, diversifying. A sublime blend of inspiration and ingenuity. I love you all. 💖

Your Invitation

On behalf of Suntonu Bhadra, Indubala Kachhawa, and myself, I’m extending an invitation to our Paper Poetry family to join our virtual party in celebration of Paper Poetry’s one-year anniversary. ✨

Please share with us your poem, prose, story, journal, doodle, art, or relevant artistic expressions by August 16, with the tag ‘Paper Poetry 1 Year’, and we will highlight your story with our readers. Suntonu Bhadra

Sonnet, twittle, tanka, free verse, stornelli

If you’ve been around poetry for a while, you’ll know there’s more to being a poem than being a poem. A poem can take many forms. Some poems, for example, prose poems and monoku, don’t even look like poems. But they read as poems. So they are poems.

Sonnet, twittle, tanka, free verse, stornelli are forms of poetry that look and sound like poems. I’ve tried all of them. Even the stornelli.

To date, I’ve only written one stornelli.

I called it, Congratulations Paper Poetry! 🎊

Stornelli, for those of you interested in poetry fun facts — or maybe party games! — is plural for stornello.

By definition, a stornello is a tercet (a three-line poem) with an aaa rhyme scheme and 11 syllables per line.

It originated from Italy as a form of lyrical folk song and at one stage was used by the Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi.

Unsurprisingly, Medium didn’t have a tag for stornello (or stornelli) — not until I made one, that is! 😊

We can thank Somsubhra Banerjee for introducing Mediumites to this new-old form of poetry. Stornello is one of 15 uncommon forms of poetry Som has challenged us to attempt. Great party game, Som! 🎉

💥 Hope to see you all at our virtual party. 💥

To RSVP, please submit your celebration poem ~ prose ~ story ~ journal ~ doodle ~ artwork by AUGUST 16, with the tag ‘Paper Poetry 1 Year’. 🙏 💕