Riffle through your old poems and pull from them a poem that has yet to find a home. Perhaps it isn’t quite finished or perhaps it is different thematically from your other work. Experiment with this poem in one, or all, of the following ways:
Write a “part two” to the poem.
Arbitrarily rearrange the words, lines and stanzas on the field of the page based on some principle that you invent. For example, perhaps words beginning with a particular letter are flush with the left margin while words beginning with a different letter are always indented so many spaces from the left margin. Maybe nouns contain extra spaces or are centered. Use your imagination.
Cut your poem up and rearrange its words. Paste the new onto a colorful piece of paper.
Most of all, enjoy the process. And feel free to post your results in the comments area below.
After much cutting and pasting and tabbing only lines beginning with letters from the second half of the alphabet, this came about:
morning light grazing fields
frost heaved stones
emerge blindly
from soil,
their cold cores
stretch into their long
morning shadows –
never
having sought a sun
they could not see,
they warm,
in the end,
in spite of themselves
Thanks so much for sharing and contributing to the poetic conversation.
Pingback: Links to Some of My Poems that Can Be Found on the Web | phanaerozoic