Not only words. Even poems.

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It's almost impossible to write about refrigerator doors without mentioning magnetic poetry. The history of this literary genre probably also dates back to the time when people would visit each other's apartments and sit in the kitchen to drink a cup of coffee. The first examplars were probably hand made, typed or handwritten words attached to magnets, randomly scattered on the refrigerator door, waiting for someone to take some of those words and arrange them into a poem. It didn't take long until someone marketed the idea, and magnetic poetry sets were for sale ... well, wherever that sort of thing got sold.

Numerous anthologies of magnetic poetry are available online. At least one of these lists, along with the poems themselves, the poetry kit used to write/construct the poem. This simple fact suggests that different poetry kits will generate different poems, which is of course true. But it also raises an interesting question: do we judge the merit of a poem by the end result - the poem itself and how it affects us, or do we judge it as we would a gymnastics competition, giving points not only for the end result, but for the degree of difficulty of the exercise attempted? If, for instance, we used a "cat lovers" kit to write a love poem, should that generate more respect than had we used a "romance" kit?

And of course, with the web as a metaphoric refrigerator door, it makes sense that magnetic poetry can also be written online. The first, or at least most impressive, of these which I encountered doesn't seem to be available any more. (A similar, though less impressive, example is accessible here.) About five years ago I had the honor of being part of a project that translated that first example into Hebrew, and it's still up and running.

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