Considering the controversy surrounding AI-generated art, I hope sharing this isn’t too bad. Using free app of the day TapUniverse AI Art Generator for iOS, just to play around with it, I input a photo of classic blue and gold marbling from the endpapers of an antique book. After selecting the steampunk style, it generated this nifty image.
books
Zzzzzhakespeare
reading in my cozy bed, ridiculously late
words begin to slur and rhymes, to blear
my eyelids fight me — like a heavyweight
goodnight, sweet sleepy zzzzzhakespeare
—Terri Guillemets
Long ago now
I am searching for my feelings
through shelves of dusty books
can’t help but feel I’ve left them
in some forgotten ancient nooks
as if an author long before me
captured my emotions in his day
and saved them in fine poetry
for future me to find someway
—Terri Guillemets
What I do
altered prose by Terri Guillemets, 2019
from The Man Who Loved Jane Austen
by Sally Smith O’Rourke, 2001, page 53
Book party!
Let’s get drunk at the library
and have a book party!
“What a good time!” she said
in an excited whisper.
—Terri Guillemets
scrambled blackout poetry created from F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925, Scribner trade paperback, 2004,
Middle
A headstone is just a bookmark in our unfinished lives.
—Terri Guillemets
Censorship
To kill words with fear,
It’s a dreadful thing.
—Don’t.
blackout poetry created from Charles Dickens, “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain,” 1848, as published in The Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens, edited by Peter Haining, 1983 edition,
—Terri Guillemets
A life with papers
Any real writer — or reader — has had a papercut on the forehead at least once.
—Terri Guillemets
Classics declassified
Grass of Walt
[D!@%] of Moby
Boz gets Lit
Bard’s the [$h¡t]
—Terri Guillemets

Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare
image created 2023 with TapUniverse AI Art Generator, Rhonna Collage,
Nineteen eighty-seven
Been collecting quotes
since nineteen eighty-seven,
Be collecting them ’til
the day I go to Heaven.
And if by chance
it’s to the contrary,
Here’s hoping Hell
has a great library!
—Terri Guillemets
P.S. I had this on the “about me” page of The Quote Garden until I was going through the memory box my mom made for me and came across the essay I wrote in school about The Scarlet Letter, which was the book that really got me seriously hooked on collecting quotations. And this essay was dated October 1986. I had only taken a best guess about the 1987 date. So now with dated proof, I had to ‘eighty-six’ this silly little autobio poem. But I’m keeping it anyway as a scrapbook memory for myself. I’ve yet to attempt a rewrite rhyming the proper year, although ‘Styx’ has great literary potential.
Petals & leaves
i love to
smell the flowers
and sniff the books
sitting in gardens
and library nooks
—Terri Guillemets
From the library to the park
Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a
—Terri Guillemets