by Amy Miller
Sooner or later, it happens to most poets: You’ve run out of ideas, you’re tired of writing in that same old voice, or you feel so pressured to craft a masterpiece that you avoid writing altogether. Maybe you have full-on writer’s block, with your mind feeling as dry as a…as a…oh, forget it, you can’t think of the word. Or you just feel stale and static every time you try to write. The good news is, that stale, blocked feeling might be a signal that a change is coming: Maybe you’re ready to leap to a new level or explore a side of your writing you didn’t know existed. If you’re stuck in one of these poetry ruts, or just ready to try something new, here are 10 playful, unconventional exercises to help get your creative sparks flying again.
Sometimes it’s daunting just to begin writing on a blank page or screen—all that space demanding to be filled! To sidestep that pressure, think on a smaller scale: Write a poem on a postcard, Post-it note, or nametag. You can’t get more than about a 12-line poem on a postcard, and a nametag will hold maybe 6 or 8 lines. Writing in such confinement forces you to narrow your focus; you won’t get the whole story of your grandmother’s immigration on a Post-it, but you might be able to capture the smell of the ocean or the creaking of the ship. And that kind of detail may make for a more powerful poem than a long epic. (Plus, you can write the epic later, or piece together several small poems to make a larger one.) Writing “small” tricks the brain into thinking poetry is easy, even though any poet knows a good haiku can be as hard to write as a thousand-line narrative. If you’d rather not buy postcards or nametags, just draw boxes in a notebook or set some rulers in your word-processing program: The “letter” part of a postcard is about 3 inches wide by 2-1/2 high; most printer-ready, sheet-style nametags are 4 wide by 2 high.
Ever heard the old adage about how you should throw away the first pancake? It has something to do with the griddle not being ready, and this can also apply to poems—sometimes our first “take” on an idea isn’t the best one. To get beyond that first impression, go ahead and write a poem on any topic—it doesn’t have to be good—then set it aside and write another poem on the same subject, perhaps even with the same title. And then another, and if you’re feeling like a superpoet, maybe 5 or 10 more. (Keeping them short will prevent burnout.) By the third or fourth poem, you may be surprised by the deeper connections you’re making, like tying the wineglass from the first poem to a fight after a party or your aunt’s surreally cluttered kitchen. With each subsequent poem, let yourself write whatever comes to mind, no matter how far-fetched—when you’re writing a batch of poems, who cares if some things don’t work out? If you find a topic especially fertile, extend it over several sittings; you may end up with a set of poems you can later craft into a thematically linked series, or even a chapbook.
That’s not daunting at all, right? Actually it isn’t, if you consider what a symphony is made of: smaller parts that differ wildly from each other—fast, slow, lilting, bombastic. Set out to write a poem in three, four, or more sections, but make them drastically different from each other in tone, voice, line length, or form. Alternate prose poetry with tanka, first person with third; mix speech patterns, fragments, meter, and rhyme. Build the poem, moving from style to style and keeping it interesting with quick, unexpected cuts. If symphonies aren’t your thing, model your poem on an unconventional pop song, like “Band on the Run” or “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” that’s actually a sequence of shorter tunes.
One genre that never seems to go out of style is found poetry—poems that take phrases from non-poetic sources like newspapers, ads, and textbooks, and rearrange them into a new work that either comments on the original or veers off into a new subject. One great source for this material is government documents such as voter pamphlets, tax guides, and scientific reports. Driver’s manuals, to use one example, are full of evocative phrases—“Others may be daydreaming,” “Do not try to beat the train,” “Never assume everything will be all right”—that practically beg to be used as metaphors, and not just about motoring safety. Find a source document and start cutting-and-pasting away, moving phrases and deleting connecting tissue to create a poem that’s very different than the original source. Note: Many government documents are in the public domain and can be put through your poetry blender without risking copyright violation. But if you’re in doubt, do some online research to make sure the material is in fact in the public domain.
If the very thought of sitting down to “write a poem” is turning you off, trick yourself by writing something that’s not a poem. Pick a subject—it could be as banal as a diary entry, or maybe an experience fresh in your mind, a memory, or a single word—and start writing about it in an unruly torrent, an unedited freeform monologue without any line breaks. That’s crucial: Don’t break it into lines or pay any attention to how it’s laying out on the page as it spews onto your screen, notebook, or voice-recognition program. Don’t stop to edit; leave in every crazy free association and non-sequitur. Then, when the flow has stopped, save or transcribe what you’ve written, make a copy (set aside the original), and start breaking it into lines, editing things out, and rearranging. This editing process can take it in any number of directions: What words or phrases seem superfluous when you break it into lines? What happens if you keep only the non-sequiturs and wild associations? Or if you edit them all out? Does it really want to be a poem with lines, or does it have more energy as a prose poem, or even as flash-fiction or flash-memoir? Can you extract several small poems from it? This writing prompt is also a revision exercise, giving you raw material that be crafted into any number of poems or prose pieces.
As poets, we all have our specialties—our voice, the topics we’re known for, our characteristic word choices, sounds, and syntax. There’s nothing wrong with having a distinctive style, but these “default” modes can sometimes land us in a poetry rut where we feel like we’re writing the same poems over and over. To clear your writing palate, try something that’s way out of your comfort zone. If you like full sentences, write a stanza of fragments. If you hate long couplets, write a whole poem of them. If your poems tend to be square-shaped, write a skinny one, or a scattershot one that’s all over the page. If your poems tend to unfold in logical narrative, try a surprising twist at each line’s start. If you can’t stand limericks, write a series of them, making them uniquely your own. The goal here is to attain a sort of “beginner’s mind,” where being bad at something is fun because you don’t expect to be good at it yet. And who knows? It might actually be…good.
Poetry is, of course, personal writing about our own perceptions of the world. But sometimes writing from the first-person “I” viewpoint can become its own poetry rut, making poems feel repetitive, limited, or tonally flat, even to the poet. To widen the camera’s lens, go to a café or park and write about the people and things around you—the barista, the guy absorbed in his laptop, the dog outside the door, the women laughing, the old brick wall, the sign in the bathroom about the cranky plumbing. Use dialog you overhear, or put words in people’s mouths. Write only in third person—he, she, they, it—and don’t let yourself make an appearance in the poem. Who are those people? What have they seen? What brought them here? Try one person or object, then another. Make each a little story, a character sketch, or even a brash manifesto on how that person thinks and lives. Of course the resulting poems will still be about your own perceptions, memories, biases, and assumptions, but those other people will be the conduit.
To reach even farther outside yourself—and then circle back to your own experiences—scan a newspaper or online news site and find a story that strikes a chord with you emotionally. Maybe it’s about someone trapped in a sinking ship, triggering your claustrophobia, or a project to help sea turtles that stirs your world-saving compassion, or a hapless criminal who reminds you uncomfortably of your ex. Jot down sensory images that come to mind as you read the story—smells, tastes, sounds, textures—merging the landscape of the news article with an event or person from your own life. Then, incorporating these sensory images, write a poem about that personal experience or memory that this story churns up inside you. This exercise avoids an occasional pitfall of “poems of witness” and news-based poems: appropriating a stranger’s story to crassly mine it for emotion. This exercise is about your story, employing the news article as a sensory route back to that experience of your own that you may have forgotten, or haven’t been able to write about before.
Like writing in small spaces (see #1), writing in forms—sonnets, triolets, ghazals, and the like—can help narrow down your choices, which can be a good thing when a wide-open, blank page is staring you in the face. The beauty of forms is that part of the work is already done for you: With a sonnet, you know you’ve got to make your point in 14 lines; with a haiku, only three (-ish, depending on whom you talk to). If you’re tackling a sestina, after you’ve set up the first stanza, you already know the end word of every line in the poem. In a pantoum, you’ve already written half of the lines before you get to them. That’s not to say forms are easy; some are notoriously devilish (villanelle, anyone?). But that’s part of their beauty too; because writing in form is so difficult to do well, it can help lower your standards a little, tying up your logical, critical mind with the mechanics of the puzzle while freeing your subconscious to make creative leaps, much like those brilliant ideas we get in the shower or while driving to work.
Many of these suggestions have been about relieving pressure. But pressure isn’t always bad; some people do their best work under the force of several G’s, with their ears about to pop. To see if you like that ratcheted stress, try challenging yourself to a public writing task, like the April marathon of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo). Or try one of the nationwide postcard-poetry projects (google “poetry postcard”), or set up your own poem-a-day writing marathon with friends via an e-mail list or Facebook group. Sometimes there’s nothing like accountability—promising you’ll be there every day, with a freshly written poem—to pull you out of a rut and get you back on the road and writing.
AMY MILLER’s chapbooks include I Am on a River and Cannot Answer and White Noise Lullaby, and her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. She won the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, judged by Tony Hoagland, and the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize from Cultural Weekly. She lives in Oregon and blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.