Let's talk about found poetry!

A few days ago, I submitted a piece to Rattle editor Tim Green's (timiathan's) Found Poetry Project. Here are the relevant links:

• to the poem I found, formatted, and submitted
• to the rules of the project

I wrote more about Tim's Found Poetry Project at Secret Vespers, my webcomic, which I am none so subtly plugging. Found poetry is all about noticing the poetry that happens all the time, by accident, all around us. I think it is good for you, something you can do while you go about your artist's life of not exactly listening to people but noticing how they talk, and that it splashes a little fun over everything.

So for a prompt, I suggest you go out and find some poetry. We'll go more or less by the Rattle rules. When you post it, say where you found the source material. And maybe you can get it published somewhere.

The Found Poetry Project has an LJ RSS feed: foundpoetry_rss.

I hope you have been saving your rejection slips. There is a journal that specializes in great works that have been rejected five times.

There is something about that premise I kind of love. Everyone tells you that great work is often rejected, but the editors of the Rejected Quarterly are actually proving they believe it. Maybe this will make you feel more brave about submitting elsewhere. It is hard work, racking up five rejections for a piece!

Hi, write_away. For our Saturday prompt, let's play with music interpretation!

Have you ever seen Fantasia? In it, Disney animates stories to go with wordless, classical music. The idea of music representing stories is not new, it became common practice in the nineteenth century, but baroque and earlier composers did it, too.

Vivaldi's Four Seasons is an example. The three movements of the Spring concerto match three sonnets (this translation loses the form):

Allegro
Springtime is upon us.
The birds celebrate her return with festive song,
and murmuring streams are softly caressed by the breezes.
Thunderstorms, those heralds of Spring, roar, casting their dark mantle over heaven,
Then they die away to silence, and the birds take up their charming songs once more.

Largo
On the flower-strewn meadow, with leafy branches rustling overhead, the goat-herd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him.

Allegro
Led by the festive sound of rustic bagpipes, nymphs and shepherds lightly dance beneath the brilliant canopy of spring.

Your prompt is to take a work of music that has no words and write a poem or a series of events or remarks that make a story from the music. Comment here and I will suggest some music for you, or you can pick something for yourself. An extra challenge may be to take a work that has a definite, canonical story to it, such as Dukas' symphonic poem based on Goethe's Sorceror's Apprentice, and create a whole new narrative or impression for it.

We writers often use our own experiences to build stories. Without getting into a pointless, formless speculation about the relationship between imagination and experience, let's just say there is some combination of the two at work in good, honest writing.

Time to put some of your life experience to work! Your Saturday "resource" is the your last kiss. Your challenge is to write a short piece of fiction based on it. Maybe leave the names the same. Maybe leave everything the same, except set it in a colony far off in space. Just be true to the experience, and write something that puts a reader right there.

One great thing about limits is how much ingenuity they give you. You all may be familiar with Twitter (my own twitter is here: twitter/somerled). Some people use it as a place to narrate stories in 140 letter bursts, others drop web links, little poems, or context-free, disjointed and random thoughts.

There is also a site that publishes one-sentence stories. It presents an interesting challenge: how much scenario, style and mood can you convey in just one sentence?

You might find the site interesting. I propose you post some stories in one sentence as comments to this post. You might find they work as opening sentences in a larger story.

How angsty do you get about your writing, and are you sure you're getting angsty enough? I mean think about it. Have you taken an object or dynamic lately, and filled it forever with some new meaning no one else has seen before, yet somehow fits it perfectly?

Maybe this isn't much of a "resource" but for fun try a google search on terms such as:
—is it dull
—is it awful
—am I pointless

and other highly angst-ridden phrases (I am sure you can generate plenty), and write a story based on the best search results that come up, using topics, word choices, phrases, or anything in sight.

I saw some pretty promising search results. But mostly I hope everyone will join me here in the depths of artistic angst.

Hi write_away, let's write some made-up reviews!

Granted of course all reviews are made up, vaguely self-indulgent expositions of the reviewer's personal neuroses, half-baked ideas and total ignorance with respect to the work under review. But let's take it one small step further, and post reviews for works that, for all we know, have never been written.

No rules. The work for review can be biography, literary fiction, a recently discovered Jane Austin soft core, poetry, non-fiction, whatever. Don't spend any effort googling to see whether your made-up title exists. Don't spend more than an hour. Time is money! Have at it. Here's mine:

A History of the Bridgewater Town Merchant's Association — A Review by Somerled

In his furious assault against the gates of convention, local historian Jim Vitrine dismantles the veritable wall of mythology that has for too long surrounded and shielded us from the invasion of truth. Stark logic guides this discourse to an inexorable conclusion—a conclusion that will no doubt anger many. From the infamous scuttling of the four-way stop proposal at Main St and Bank, to the controversial passage of two bylaws at the 1963 General Meeting, where it is alleged no quorum was obtained, Vitrine does not so much break new ground as drive an earthquake through the very fundament of our belief system in this post-modern town. This is not a work of history. It is a weapon of history.

Let's talk about your ego and how it interferes with your writing! If you look very honestly at what you write, is it obvious you are posing for the reader? Are you being coy and seductive because you want the reader to love you? Are you being complicated and academic because you want the reader to think you are smart? What pieces of your self image are you unwilling to let go when you write? What are you trying to confirm?

Do you think the writer should be present in the writing? If so, then why do you think any reader wants to buy in to your head trips? If not, then why do you think there is anything special about your own writing compared to any other author? Discuss!

Is it Saturday already? I can never tell. Anyway, on to this week's Saturday Resources post.

I have one word for you, just one word: t-shirts.

A good friend of mine claims, "No poem is ready until it has a great t-shirt line in it." What do you think of this? Does your own poetry hold up?

Here's an exercise for the community. Go through poetry posts and offer t-shirt suggestions on the poems! Feel free to offer graphic suggestions as well as choose the perfect t-shirt line from the poem. Looking through your favorite poems outside this community, can you find great t-shirt lines in them? Post them to the community (behind a friends-lock for copyright reasons).

Remember: the t-shirts sell better than the poetry itself.

Here is a pretty good discussion of things a lot of you (we) do because we are writers and want to write well, but overcompensate in all the wrong ways. Check it out: Writerisms and Other Sins.

There are many views on style and aesthetic in writing. Some of these will not be your own. Some of these will be antithetical to all you hold true and good. Why let these heresies prevail?

Engage your fellow critique-mongers in fierce online poetry debates! Debate is an excellent mechanism to test your theories against other theories, to discover how broad the field ranges, to convince and be convinced, to learn of new approaches and techniques in which you, too, can experiment.

As your Saturday Resource, I encourage you to look at other comments on critiqued pieces here, and to use them as springboards for (respectful) debate and learning.

I know I'm speaking out of turn; it's not Saturday, and this isn't a resource, except in the sense that other people's disasters are great resources for writing.

So here's your prompt (thank slomosexual for it): I was part of the La Jolla Relief Effort, &...

Post your responses in comments, in separate posts, wherever. I did one up at my journal, you all can read and comment if you like, it's just for fun.

Check this link to contests out, and maybe you will find someplace to submit your work. It leads to compilations of contests, and also has information about scams and the like.

Unless you have a very good spam filter, you probably get an occasional paragraph-length text that brushes so close to semantic meaning it almost reads like poetry. These are usually Markov-chain generated. Markov chains study the positional relationships of objects (words) in a sequence (text) and create random object sequences (word texts) that preserve the same probability certain words will follow certain other words. More or less.

Anyway, there is a Markov chain in an irc bot at my work, who blurts out sentence-length gems by riffing on our work conversations. Today it said:

they must have forgot glue in the name of the physical

Here is a Markov chain generator online. I fed it a short story of mine just now, and among other things it returned:

satisfying the table with a cufflink

One interesting thing about Markov chains is how much of your style is actually preserved in the mashing. See what I mean by feeding it short excerpts and reading what comes out, see if the latter reminds you of the former. And then, maybe, yank out some little brilliant bits and write a poem or short story to incorporate them. Bonus points to anyone who uses either of the above!

It has been a while since I posted one of my weekly Saturday Resources community posts. I can barely even remember what I am supposed to post about or whether I am supposed to be helpful, so I thought I would post my very own advice on how to write something. Actually, I copy & pasted this from a comment of mine in another community.

So here it is. You will notice there is a poem embedded in it. Feel free to critique this! Also, if you know of any guides that have helped you to write something, mention them in the comments. And without further ado, How to Write Something, according to somerled:

( How to Write Something )

Smell is the most direct sense. It evokes place memory, stirs appetite and lust, and turns the stomach. Patrick Süskind's Parfum uses scent, description and characterization with brilliant results. Generally smell is under-used in descriptive writing. Most of us rely on visual and auditory input, and the page is itself a visual and auditory/linguistic medium. Most of us have trained our eyes and ears to appreciate art, music, and words, but have comparatively little life experience with smell.

I found this list of chemicals and the smells they make. The descriptions of these smells are raw and gritty at times, at others innocuous.

I propose you find yourself a sample of each of these chemicals, or at least the everyday things they smell like, and haul yourself a few lungs full. See how the smells make you feel, what they remind you of. Then use that in your writing.

The only reason to watch the remake of Sabrina is for this scene:
NE'ER DO WELL BROTHER: What, you work on Sunday now?
WORKAHOLIC BROTHER: Today is Wednesday.

Right. As very few of you no doubt know, every Saturday I shirk my mod duty post about how to get stuff published and whatever. So here I am on a Wednesday urging you to write about the weather!

Do up a poem or short prose piece in which the weather does something inappropriate, surprising, boring, or stupid!

You ask, "That sounds like fun but what's the catch, somerled?"

There's no catch! Just make sure that the weather juxtaposes and dominates, but does not motivate the situation. Everything is in place for some other reason, and then WHAM! — weather.

Have fun!

Saturday comes again and again and again.

If you think you can write the sort of artistic statement that civil servants and university culture peers will love, and if you think you can accept government money without compromising your artistic virtue, then have at it! Here is a very basic start:

Americans
Australians
Brits
Canadians

Your city, state, local council, province, or whatever is likely to have its very own funding agency. You can find more precise information than I can hope to link in a reasonable post with a little google work. Should you go in to meet with someone, remember not to gripe about how they are spending more money on salaries and overhead to decide whether to spend money on your project, than your project would cost them in twelve months.

I can't give you much practical advice except this; your proposal will not be evaluated on its artistic merits so much as on how well the money supplied will be managed and accounted for, how clear the proposal deliverables are, whether the artistic deliverables deal with generally acknowledged contemporary issues, and whether you and your partners/mentors/whatevers have a good track record. Oh, and on your public relations plan.

By the time you get through all of the paperwork, you could probably have finished your project anyway. Good luck!

Saturday again! Here's a link to a list of poetry forms. Form can sometimes help a poem. You might want to block pop-ups.

Last week, I took a poll on what we're aiming to do, writing-wise, over the next few months.

Many of us are out to develop new material. The prompts at write_away help with that first sentence or line. But remember the whole world is a writing prompt, too.

Let's talk synopsis. Some people define it as a blurb of a few sentences that encapsulates the story. Some define it as a text of about two pages that outlines the story. Stand-alone poems shouldn't need either, but it would be cool to write a chapbook of poem synopses to unwritten poems. A manuscript of poetry can use at least a blurb.

Since no one knows art like the taxman does, let's use the language of the Canadian film tax credits programme, where the synopsis is the "elevator pitch" of a few sentences, and the outline is the two-pager. In terms of what is what, a good convention for a writer to follow, is whatever convention the person with the money is following.

Mechanically, both the synopsis and outline:
- tell, don't show (the opposite of the writing)
- use omniscient third person
- use present tense

Within these restrictions, the writer has the impossible task of making the synopsis and outline "feel" like and represent the story.

There is a good example of a synopsis here, and also some tips on query letter writing.

There are some good sample outlines here, although the site uses "synopsis" (the great thing about standards, is there are so many to choose from).

Since there is so little agreement in the industry as to what is what and how to present it, it is best to research, inquire, and know the standards in play everywhere a writer submits work. Some production houses are specific down to type font, margins, and capitalizations. Bottom line, once in the elevator with the VP Development:

VP-DEV: Alright kid. I'm getting off on the next floor. What's this story of yours about?
WRITER: (delivers 2-3 line synopsis)
VP-DEV: Maybe it'll sell. I've got five minutes this afternoon -- four more than I give anyone. Email me.
WRITER: (emails 1-2 page outline from nearest hotspot)

In a nutshell, no one will read beyond a boring 2-3 line synopsis, no one will read beyond a flawed 1-2 page outline, and no one will read beyond a badly written first 3 chapters/scenes. Good luck!

So, what are you all up to? I'll use the results to prioritize the next few Saturday Resources posts.

Poll #910722 Writing Goals 2007
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

My writing objectives for the next six months are:

My major writing medium in the next six months will be:

Which English words end in in -dous? What rhymes with orange? Just ask the Oxford Word and Language Service team.

Oxford University, by the way, is an educational institution of some local notoriety. The co-branded Oxford English Dictionary is hell-bent on proving that the English somehow invented the language.

Maybe you have all been busy writing your November novels. A thread a couple of posts back got into the fine question of throwing old work away versus keeping it for reference. What do you do? Quite a few characters in my recent stories and poems not only throw away their old work, they throw away or hide really fantastic new pieces without ever showing them to anyone. I think it would make an interesting prompt for the community... the only catch is that critique would be difficult. Would we critique based on how successfully we eradicate all trace of the work in question? On how vague a summary of it we post?

I notice that citizenwind has released a DVD. What better place to find a curious and receptive audience than right here, among other writers and poets known for their taste and style. I bet the DVD will make a great stocking stuffer, and shipping costs are included! I would love to hear about all the great new releases, nominations and publications our members rack up. So go ahead and promote.

If you have a lot of "books and book-like products" which you sell at readings and competitions, then perhaps you should consider getting some ISBNs.

These are the 10 (soon to be 13) digit codes used in publishing to identify publications. Bar codes are then based on the ISBN. It might make it easier to get your small-scale material, such as chapbooks, collections of previously published stories, and the like into local bookstores near the venues you tour. It also makes your work easier to register, list, and protect. It might lead to certain libraries ordering copies.

Anyway, chances are you have material worth selling on a small scale but not likely to go into mass production. So, get yourself some ISBNs.

Find out more here.

My inability to resist spur-of-the-moment challenges has led me four fifteenths of the way through a chapbook based on a random selection of song titles.

Do you find yourself in the same predicament?

If so, check out some of these contests (or bookmark them for when they open):
Anabiosis Press
MSR Chap
Slapering Hol Press
Tupelo Press

Anyone know any other chapbook markets?

Modern haiku is not so restrictive as what your samurai great-grandfather thought. I came across a haiku/senryu association. They stage haiku contests here, you know.


Haiku, Senryu

winter passes
but glory resides
with whoever can tell
the difference