“When You Just Can’t Poem”
My dodgy advice to my Stafford Challenge Writers Group
Somehow I decided to do The Stafford Challenge. A poem a day for a year. So far, so good. I’m masochistic, apparently.
I also decided to steward a speculative poets writer group and have discovered some brilliant writers I’m enjoying time and word with. I’m not qualified to adult worth a damn, but I’m a steward. I’m writing handouts and materials for the group I’m stewarding. Imposter syndrome is a beast. I checked in and saw some of the issues myself and peers were having and decided to share things I’ve learned and do to endure, I mean ensure I write daily, even in current extreme stress.
Here’s some bad advice for poets and writers in general-
“When You Just Can’t Poem”
Advice, tips, tricks and challenges for those days you are stuck, short on time, and your brain refuses to create anything. Dealing with the white noise in your brain, squirrels, and “writers”.
-A poem can be anything. A haiku counts. A single line counts as a micropoem. A short form nonet counts-extreme bonus points if you make it rhyme and actually work. Found poetry works in a jam.
-If you want to use a form and are struggling -chuck the form out the window, even if half the poem is in the form. Sometimes poems don’t want to wear our grandmothers girdles, squeeze into the Spanx, remove the tie around their neck and sometimes they gotta take the bra off or get into their sweatpants as soon as they get to the second stanza and that’s OK -there are no rules!
-Found erasure poetry. Take a screenshot of a rejection letter, a book page, then use markup/edit the photo to remove words. Erase until you’ve created a poem.
-Write daily and but revise/repent at leisure. Just write something every day. Workshop/revise/perfect it later. Just get it out. Perfect it later, we’ve a whole year.
-Save scraps to build a quilt- if you only have one image, or one phrase, or a random tidbit or a leftover word canapé that’s wilted, or a petit four with teeth marks in it and no “poem” set that fragment aside and put them together later into a poem. Scraps can make a great quilt. Raid that garbage disposal. Grab all the veggies hanging out and starting to look sketchy and turn them a stirfry. Clean the mental refrigerator. Use the leftovers. Waste nothing.
-Go to your bookcase. Start at one end of the bookcase and grab words and titles and turn them into a poem. craft a poem or a narrative poem even by remixing it your book titles and the things on the spines. It’s a form of both found and erasure poetry. You may be able to create a narrative over the course of the shelf for two or three or four, you’ll also notice the themes in your books and be able to come up with something really strange and exciting. Remix your bookspines!
-Timed challenges can sometimes shake a poem loose from your brain. I personally am a smoker, disgusting habit, but it is my only vice, caffeine doesn’t count to me, and I will give myself one cigarettes time to write something.
-Another time challenge that I use is writing a poem and the time it takes for water to boil or from the moment I hit “on” on the electric kettle to the time it beeps and whatever I have written in that several minutes is either a poem or the start of a poem. My “Kirke on Amazon Prime Day“ started as a five minute wait for water to boil poem. I wanted tea and used the time to start a poem.
-Write a poem in the time it takes the Starbucks barista to complete your drink and call your name. Write a poem in the time it takes your food to arrive at the table. Try to poem in the time for the air fryer roasted potatoes. Microwave poems can happen too but those 30 second increments can get pretty crazy.
-Open a thesaurus and choose three to seven random words. Use all three in the poem of the day. You can do this with a dictionary, or grab the random words from urban dictionary if you’re feeling snarky.
-Try to use a word that always looks misspelled to you. Many people have a word that never looks right to them or sounds weird to them sometimes. Use that word that looks or sounds wonky to you. The words “pantyhose”, “tree” or “mommy” have, some days, seemed particularly odd or misspelled to me, and I have put them in poems.
-Everyone might have a word they hate or makes them cringe. A lot of people hate the word “moist “, for example. Use that word — elevate it, celebrate it, play with it, mock it, have fun with it. If you have a least favorite word, epithet, or profanity, take it and see what it can do for you poetically when you start unpacking it’s baggage. Lean in and write in the discomfort, write through the discomfort. You don’t have to “take the word back” or make peace with it, you just need to work with it and yourself. Push yourself a little out of the comfort zone.
-Grab an old magazine or a ratty-covered paperback and create some thing new from a page by taking a black marker and removing all the words that aren’t *your* poem. Make the reader think and find meaning- if it’s not straightforward.
-Spam Jam Poetry- Go in your email and put together titles/headlines and the whining from your neighbors on NextDoor and all the weird things that pop up in your inbox together for a snapshot of society and social commentary. I found “Robotaxis are parked in purgatory” as a headline and I have this sitting in my collection of things to use somehow someday somewhere. Headlines about beauty trends, current events, lifestyle articles and tech news are ripe fruit for kickstarting a poem. Real estate listings also work. Find the poetry everywhere!
-Collaborate. There is no rule anywhere saying that our poem of the day must be written by only us. So choose a writing buddy and take turns writing lines- again edit at leisure. Pick a topic or theme and get on messenger or email and craft a poem together where both of you are driving the car and have no idea where it will go. Have fun word stunting with each other. Remember to keep your ego at the door. We’re all in this together 🖤
-Exquisite Corpse poems are a workshop/writers group tradition. One person comes up with a title and everyone contributes a line or a fragment or a piece as they interpret title and the person who created the title puts them all together and reanimates the parts into a poem at end of the day once everyone had provided a line to the Franken-poem. It’s alive!!! And everyone gets a poem for that day!
-Pick a song. Choose a line. Write a poem from the point of view/setting /feelings or about that single line. It is an after poem. Music and lyrics can be a springboard. Take a favorite poem choose a favorite line- do an after poem. Read an article that really hit you hard? Write a poem about it or disagree with their opinion if it’s an opinion piece. Respond react write.
-Alphabet poems- but do it differently. Choose a letter and try to use as many words with that letter or sound possible. It’s actually a lot harder than it sounds. Do not try to do this unless you have 15 or more minutes to experiment with the letter of the day.
-Ekphrastics- Collect pieces of art or images found online and keep them in a folder to use as writers prompts.
-Copy paste anything that tickles you- (except this writers tricks essay)- credit and attribute whenever possible! Use it in your poem.
-Eavesdrop. All writers eavesdrop constantly so if you pick up an interesting piece of conversation, even if you’ve heard it wrong and it inspires you, use it. Harlan Ellison’s “Jeffy is five” was him mishearing “Jeffery is fine.” at a party and became the spark for an iconic haunting science-fiction classic.
-At home, work, and coffee shops that’s where most poetry is written, so change your setting. I am not recommending renting a villa in France or Spain for a month or going on a vacation to shake poems loose, but write someplace that is not familiar, or isn’t comfortable or your safe space. Write in a park, in public, at a bus stop, on a walk or at the fitness center, just make sure the scenery is different. Different places bring out different voices in us.
-If you do spoken word pieces or performance poetry, use autocorrect as an ally and not the enemy. Autocorrect can sometimes come up with amazing lines and if you are using speech to text and dictating a poem, sometimes those mistranscribed words are magic. Let autocorrect surprise you and derail your train of thought/stream of consciousness. You be really surprised what an spontaneous “duck”may ignite 🤣
-Do you have a word that no matter what you have never been able to pronounce correctly or misread? Examples “Hyperbole” is “Hyper-bowl” or “Abominable” is always “abominaminabol” or “abdominal”? Maybe you have an “abdominal snowman” poem in you, or need to figure out the epic “hyper bowl”.
-Imposter syndrome is a good thing. It keeps us honest and it keeps us striving to be better writers. All of us feel like hacks and all of us think we suck and compliments are only people being nice because they feel the need to be polite. No matter who you are and what level of professional writer you are there will be days where you feel like you are not a “real writer”. All of us feel like imposters most of the time- you deal with it by writing more.
-Once you start thinking you are a great poet or writer, you are lost to hubris. So say it loud and proud with me- “I am a mediocre at best writer, I have no idea what I’m doing, any success I’ve ever had is editor pity or a fluke, but at least I’m writing everyday and trying. Go me!”
-Be kind to yourself, we’re all our own worst critics and self-reject/self-sabotage our writing. Support other writers and respect their unique experiences and journeys!
-Find the poetry everywhere! It’s always there.
🖤 From Pixie
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