Playful Poetry Writing Procedures and techniques

This is the second of my Inspirations posts, designed to spark new ideas and new work.

The Poet as a Magpie with a Megaphone . Pen and collage.

The past few weeks have lurched by and now, I realise, it’s time for a new Speak Up! post. In the UK we’ve been adjusting to a grim new reality of far-right, racist violence that’s included attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers.

Alongside the usual parental tiredness, I’m also feeling the (mild) burnout that comes with finishing and submitting a manuscript: a flatness in my imagination, a need to let my creative energies rest and recover for a little while. I’ve resolved to try to read if I can, when I have time, rather than writing.

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Poetry as Play
Last month I taught a workshop on using rules, constraint and collision in poetry writing for Cath Drake’s The Verandah. These approaches, I think, are part of my toolkit for times when I want to (gently) rediscover playfulness and experimentation in my writing, without necessarily having a particular goal – or manuscript deadline – in mind.

Here are some playful poem-making techniques and approaches I return to.

Cut-Ups, Collage and Erasure
Originating in the Dada movement of 1920s France, and popularised by William Borroughs in the 1950s, the cut-up can be a way of responding to or radically transforming an existing text. Collage, in contrast, allows juxtaposition of material from a variety of sources.

I use variations of cut-up and collage to help new students think carefully and methodically about composition, without having to produce their own words.

There’s something very satisfying about this kind of word puzzle, as fridge poetry devotees will know. If you have time, finding and adding images to the mix can yield interesting and unexpected results. See Sophie Herxheimer’s work for some wonderful examples of poetry collage.

Like cut-up poetry, erasure transforms and responds to an existing text – through crossing out or removing sections of the text rather than rearranging them. See Tracy K. Smith’s powerful erasure poem ‘Declaration’.

Cento
Another type of collage. A cento is a patchwork poem made up of complete lines from other poems or texts. For example, Emily Berry’s poem ‘Freud’s Beautiful Things’ takes its lines from Freud’s letters. Erin Murphy’s poem ‘Your Mother’s Maiden Name is Not a Secret’ explores, via multiple sources, border security questions and answers.

Chance Operations
Poet, performance artist, playwright and composer Jackson Mac Low was associated with Fluxus, an avant-garde network of artists and composers, and was an advocate and practitioner of ‘chance operations’ – systems and procedures for writing or composing that removed or limited conscious intention and control. There are many other examples of artists and writers using similar techniques, but Mac Low’s Light Poems, written between 1962 and 1988, are one of my favourite examples of work written using this kind of chance operation.

Portion of the ‘light chart’ by Jackson Mac Low. https://jacket2.org.

Mac Low used a large list of different kind of light to compose the poems. These were matched with, and chosen according to, the letters in the name of the person the poem was dedicated to, and the denominations of playing cards drawn as the poem was being composed. He wasn’t entirely consistent in his procedures though: ‘The fact is that I used many different methods, ranging from ‘pure’ systematic chance to spontaneous expression,’ he explained.

I don’t think I’d ever devise such an elaborate system to create a poem, but introducing an element of chance – picking a first line at random from a notebook or book, for example – can be productive. Mac Low was influenced by Buddhist ideas around enlightenment and the need to challenge habitual thinking.

Versions and Collisions
I enjoy work that troubles and challenges categorisation, and mixes forms and influences. I love, for example, the juxtaposition of Japanese haiku tradition and jazz in Etheridge Knight’s ‘Haiku’.

I’ve written a series of poems that juxtaposed, or collided, poetry with dictionary definition, and poetry with essay footnotes. One of my favourite poetry books of recent years is Solmaz Sharif’s Look (2016) which responds to, reworks and plays with, the US Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.

I also enjoy reworking old drafts or found/ existing texts, in new ways. One poem I return to in my teaching as a starting point for exploring this ‘re-versioning’ with students is William Carlos Williams’ ‘This is Just to Say’, a poem that’s taken on a new life as an internet meme over the past few years and is robust enough to withstand all kinds of parody and rehashing.

Anne Carson’s ‘From A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways’ is another kind of re-versioning, a comic demonstration of, among other things, the slipperiness and subjectivity of translation. The fragment of Ancient Greek lyric poetry is translated into English and then as a John Donne poem, Bertolt Brecht’s FBI file, page 47 of Endgame by Samuel Beckett…

This is designed to be a brief introduction to these approaches, rather than a comprehensive list. I hope you find something useful here for times when you need to explore, reintroduce or emphasise play in your writing practice. Happy writing!

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