In a sort-of homage to Chelsey Minnis’s Bad Bad (e.g. “Mildred” or “Foxina”), we will be taking a look at a specific kind of repetition exercise today.
Your task is to create a short poem or, even better in my opinion, a prose poem in which each line uses a word from the previous line. While you work through, you should pause after each line to look up the lexical words from the previous line here or here to get ideas about the direction your should head. Move more slowly than you normally would and let yourself and your poem get carried away by language’s interconnectedness. Feel free to borrow a sentence from somewhere else to begin the activity.
Rationale: It is not natural to write this way, which for me is reason enough to try it. It will certainly slow down your composition and let you build the poem from inside the langauge rather than from your own associative idea chains. This can be a habit-busting exercise if you feel like you are in a rut.
This is also the kind of exercise that lends itself to composition on the computer, rather than long-hand writing with a pen or pencil. I find my compositional style when working directly on the computer to be much more recursive and much more full of pauses to look things up. The internet is a world of useful distractions that can be incorporated into the poem.
For Later: Using the internet’s possibility for contingency and look-up-ability can be a great revision strategy, and you can revise other compositions by following parts of it that surprise you, like a word intruding that you didn’t know you knew. Find out what it means and check it’s etymology. An interesting revision or new direction might present itself that you could not have consciously made.
NOTE: This exercise is adapted from Brian Kiteley’s The 3 A.M. Epiphany.
