A Cheap Trick for Poets

(or how to make poetry happen despite yourself)

Surely you know the feeling. You’ve got the poetry bug. You want to write. Now! Your driving urge is to create, and you want to create in words, asap. Only trouble is, you have nothing to write about. Nowhere to begin. You look at the blank page. An hour later you have managed to force out a few trite lines, and you feel like jumping off a bridge in despair. Life just isn’t fair, is it?

I have dragged myself through numerous workshops and articles which either tell me about cut-up poetry, or free association of random ideas torn from someone else’s work, or whatever. I’m not going through them now. It would take too long. The point is, either these methods didn’t go far enough (“Look, if you place two randomly selected words next to each other your brain automatically tries to make sense of them. Weird, huh? No let’s move on....”) or are too time consuming and/or restrictive (“You have these words and punctuation marks to use. No more, no less. Cut every word out. Rearrange them into a poem. Make the poem make sense.”)

Consequently I have found myself a happy medium. I have lost count of how many poems I have written this way. I can, however, assure you that they include some of my very best work; and no poem I have produced by this method has ever been trite.

*

WHAT TO DO

1. Find words.

They can be a poem. They can be creative prose. They can be a historical essay, a recipe, a Wikipedia article, a tourist guide. Even better, they can be a random mixture of several different things.

2. Write/type those words.

onto A4. Delete line-breaks. Double space. If you’re typing, justify it so it reaches both sides. Fill a page. Stop whenever the page stops. It doesn’t matter if the words make no sense. It doesn’t matter how random the break is. All you want is a solid page of words. If typed, you’ll need to print.

3. Cut the paper into squares.

Of 1-2 inches wide/high. Turn the paper over first. It doesn’t matter if you cut through words. It doesn’t matter if the squares are not exactly even. You just want about 5-12 words or word-fragments on each slip of paper.

4. Shuffle.

(4b. Depending on how many pieces you’ve got, you might want to take a random selection from the pieces of paper. 20+ squares is pushing it for one poem, unless you’re embarking on a big’un. If you’ve got, say 30, divide up into 2/3 piles, and write several poems.)

5. Pick up a square of words. Look at it.

The words and word-fragments should make no sense and, preferably, have little to do with each other. Something like:

What is in timeless
Seen it. Obey! Yes,
ns of Desolation, L

or

mist of space; endl
o, no, back, strange
as the bird flight of
by intangible, tacit

but your mind should, automatically, start to make associations between the words. Don’t let it settle on the most obvious associations either (“bird flight through mist”, for example, or “timeless desolation”). Push yourself. How about a “mist of birds”? Or “obedient desolation”? What would those be? Don’t worry about using up all the words on the paper, or sticking to their grammatical forms. Don’t even worry about sticking to the words on the paper, if something better occurs to you (after all, why waste a good idea?), provided it really is as fresh and original as what the piece of paper provides. And don’t worry, yet, about making sense.

Pick up the next piece of paper and do the same. And the next. And the next....

6. Write out what you come up with.

(In fact, do this as you go along. Don’t let yourself forget anything.) Just write out your ideas in a list. You might end up with something like....

obedient desolation. Yes, I’ve seen timelessness
mist of space-birds, endless and intangible. O no, but as tacit as it is strange

As you write you may find certain themes or motifs recurring (this might be to do with the material you began with. Using the opening scene of the Tempest I ended up with a ship at sea, and using information about Vita Sackville-West’s mansion I ended up with a manor house; on the other hand it can also be completely different. Info on T. E. Lawrence got me to a baby begotten in a lapse after a political revolution.) If you don’t see a common theme, don’t worry yet.

7. Find a starting point.

As you wrote your ideas there was probably one (or if you’re lucky, two) phrases, or groups of words, that struck you as really good, and that you want to preserve intact.

For example, I once found this among my fragments:

God in the harbour and the morning undone

which doesn’t necessarily mean a lot by itself, but sounded pretty damn cool, and by picking it out as a key phrase I ensured that everything else I picked out had to mean something in relation to it. It is only one line. Based on that one line I now have a 148 line poem, which tells the story of how a sea village interprets a shipwreck as a punishment from God for the promiscuity of a girl named Janet with visiting sailors. That line is still the apex of the whole thing. And, with 145 lines prior to it, it finally makes sense.

8. Try and fit in as many of the rest of the list of ideas to the meaning of the key line, in some sort of coherent structure, so that the thing begins to make sense.

Ok, so it’s not necessarily easy. You have to be flexible. You have to be open to weird ideas and conjunctions, to every possibility, to changing your direction at the last minute, to writing something you never intended to write. And you do still have to think.

But what this method does free you from is the responsibility of being original all by yourself. Spontaneous originality is really hard. Our brains are not wired to think of things that they’re not likely to think of. So inevitably it’s far easier to write a cliché than to write something unique. This method of writing is a way of jumpstarting original ideas, images, and subjects which you might not have thought of for yourself.

Oh, and last but absolutely, totally, completely not least:

9. EDIT.

What you have written is not finished. It will have all sorts of rough edges and loose ends that don’t make sense, even among all the juicy good stuff, simply because of the way you wrote it. Even some of the best lines may well not make sense in the context of that particular poem. Question the necessity of EVERY WORD. What work does it do? What meaning does it contribute? Does it earn its place? If not, DELETE.

And if you do write any poems using this method (or something similar; feel free to adapt it to suit yourself; that’s what I’d do) ...please send me a link?