Letting Go: Introducing Randomness Into Poetry

1. Introduction: Hi everyone, welcome to this online course, letting go, introducing randomness into poetry. My name is Cynthia Smith and I'm a recent college graduate who studied art and literature. I'm super excited to teach this course because I used to be super controlling about my art and writing. And not only did I feel terrible about the process, but I was also coming up with pieces that were really boring. You should take this class because a lot of people get stuck writing poetry the exact same style in the exact same subject. Or they stop writing poetry altogether because they feel stuck and uninspired. Discourse is primarily for people who want to switch things up in their poetry and people who need help overcoming writer's block. But if you're new to poetry, that's okay too, because this will give you a really good place to start. As for materials, you will need a book or any kind of written document. Index cards or paper cut into small pieces. A pencil or pen, and a computer with access to the Internet. In this class, you will learn how to let go of control and introduce randomness into your poetry by using tools such as books, index cards, and random word generator. I will also share my specific technique for overcoming writer's block, as well as a few tips for editing. To learn more about these processes, just go to the next video and I'll see you there. 2. Project Overview: For the project, you will be creating a series of three poems based on specific techniques I've chosen for this course. The first one is the Lost and Found Poem in when she will randomly choose words from a document you love and use them to create your own poem. The second one will be shuffled palm, in which you will write words down on index cards and randomly shuffle them to create a new poem. The third one will be a random word January poem, in which you will use a random order generator to generate new ideas for poetic lines. Once you're done with the project, you are encouraged to upload 123 poems, so the project board. So let's get started. 3. Benefits of Letting Go: I have a short story I want to share with you, and I promise it connects to the writing process. When I was in college, I studied art and I did a concentration in painting. When I first started painting, I was super uptight about it. He's just squint my eyes and put my face from right up next to the Canvas to make sure every dot was in the perfect place. This but a lot of strain on me. And it didn't actually improve the final outcome. When you looked at my paintings, you could tell I was trying way too hard to control everything because they looked too rigid. When I started loosening up, they looked so much better. You could see the brushstrokes. The colors were more blended and looked like a real painting instead of a cartoon drawing. My writing significantly improved when I realized I could apply the same principle to poetry. In the past, I would try to perfectly copy other poets style of writing and make the most perfect poem ever instead of writing something interesting and unique. Now I know perfect is just another word for cliche. And my new goal is to write something very personal. Random. There are several benefits to letting go of control and poetry. And I'm gonna give you a long list of some of them. All I want you to do is think about which one is most important to you. If you need more time, you can pause this video and journal. Otherwise, just take mental notes. The benefits are overcome writer's block by giving you several jumping off points. Diversified the subjects you read about diverse, apply the styles you've write in. Uncovering memories that you might want to share, finds more unique ways of saying what you want to say. Rather than reverting to cliches, make your writing less frigid. Take the pressure off of you because it's a collaboration with luck, rather than being a direct reflection of your talent. Make the writing process easier and make the writing process more fun. Personally, I like to use these techniques to make my palms a little bit more experimental. But as you can see, there are many different reasons for using these techniques. You might also discover other benefits that I haven't mentioned. So pay attention to what you like during the writing process. 4. Overcoming Writer's Block: Part of letting go of control and introducing randomness into poetry is accepting things for exactly as they are. Sometimes, I get writer's block because I criticize myself for words that I haven't even written yet. When I feel this way, I like to remind myself of two things. One, you can always choose to keep your poems private. Too. If you don't like the poems you write, you can always edit them later. But writing editing must be two separate processes. Otherwise, you will create a lot of frustration and a lack of flow. It's completely okay to not like something that you've written, but to judge yourself before your words even make it from your head onto the page is really, really unhelpful. Again, I do this all the time, so I'm right there with you. I do have a simple exercise that helps me most of the time. Set a timer for ten minutes and write down the first words that come to mind. Don't filter them out of there. Too weird or too boring. Don't worry about spelling things perfectly. Just write this list for yourself. This might sound really simple, but I promise it works. You can either shut this list when you're done or use the words in a later lesson. 5. Lost and Found Poem: Going back to my original talk about painting and how I used to be super rigid. One exercise that I used to do to help me loosen up is to actually close my eyes when I painted. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that's honestly what I needed in order to completely let go. Sometimes I'll close and for just a few seconds, sometimes I'll close them for the entire duration of the painting. But the point is, closing your eyes is an amazing way to completely let go. And you can do this in writing as well. So I had two different techniques that you can use with your eyes closed. And in this lesson I'm going to share with you the first one, which I call a Lost and Found Poem. For those of you who don't already know, a found poem is a poem in which you take certain words or phrases from another document. So it could be a song or a poem or a novel would offer. And then you take those words and you rearrange them in order to create your own poem. The reason why I call it a Lost and Found Poem is because you're actually going to be closing your eyes and letting your finger wander across the page in order to choose the words that you're going to use. A typical found poem. You would consciously choose the words. Then in a Lost and Found Poem, you would unconsciously use them. You can use whatever document you like. But some examples are a novel, a magazine, an article, another poem, the lyrics to a song, a textbook, or your diary. Don't use someone else's diary. Obviously, the type of document you use will greatly impact the type of words you find. A found poem based on a biology textbook will sound a lot different than a found poem based on a romance novel. Doesn't mean you can't use a biology textbook to create a romance poem, but the essence will be a little bit different. It's up to you whether you want to be super experimental and try to cross genres. Or if you want to, for example, use a romance novel to create a romance poem. In one minute, I'll have you pause this video and go grab whatever document you want to use or pull it up on your computer. If you're using something like a novel, you can also open up to the pages that you want to use. You can either flip to some random pages or consciously choose your favorites. Now that you're back, close your eyes and move your index finger around on the page. Once you feel ready, open your eyes and write down the word you landed on. Repeat this process until you're happy with the amount of force you have. And write a poem using these words. It's up to you whether you want to exclusively use it found words or add an other words on top of these. It's also up to you whether you want to use all of the chosen words or give yourself some type of veto power. This is the list of words I found from my Lost and Found Poem. I'm not going to show you the entire process of me writing a poem, but I'm just going to quickly show you how you can use these words to recreate new lines. So let's see what we have here. Perhaps she was mean because she lived in the woods for too long. The last thing I'll say about this poem is you want to give credit where credit is due and cite your sources. Especially if you're only using words from the document and you're not adding anything extra. 6. Shuffle Poem: In the last lesson, I said we're going to be doing two poems involving closing your eyes. And this is the second one. I call it a shuffle thumb because you are literally physically shuffling the words around to create a new poem. To start off, you will need to find a collection of words. It can be as small or as large of a collection as you want. I recommend about 20 to 40 words. To find a set of words, you can either use, the less you wrote during the writer's block exercise, the less you wrote in a previous lesson. A list of words from a random order generator. A list of your favorite words. Or you can ask someone else to give you a list of words once you're happy with your collection, right? Each word on its own index card. If you don't have index cards, just cut a small piece of paper into smaller pieces. Once you have them altogether, close your eyes and shuffle them around. Once you open your eyes, you can do one of two things. The first option is to take a picture or write the words down in the order they appear in. This will give you a very interesting rough draft for a new poem. You can also repeat the shoveling process several times so that you have several different options for rough drafts. The option I personally prefer is to use this process to spark ideas for really creative poetic lines that might not make sense, just hearing me explain it. So I'm going to show you an example video right now. And I like having an organized this way, that way I can read the lines left to right or right to left, or front to bottom or bottom to front or diagonal. Rather than just having everything in line. This makes it really easy for me to kinda move my eye around and get different ideas. Let's say, I love the sound of sunshine and the wind blowing through the curtains. I love to drive my car around the magic road. Don't worry if your rough drafts don't make sense because I'm going to show you how to edit them later in a future lesson. Also a pro tip is just draw these little pieces of paper in a tin and reuse them for future poems. 7. Word Generator Poem: So far you've learned how to use books and index cards to introduce randomness into your poetry. My absolute favorite tool is a random word generator. Previous lessons were more complicated and time-consuming. This one is super simple and quick. The first step is to find a random order generator. And there are a lot of different ones you can use online. Some of them aren't completely random, while others allow you to enter in specific settings that you want to use. So test out different options and use whichever one you prefer. Just like in the previous lesson, I'm gonna give you two different methods for how to do this exercise. The simpler, quicker method is to decide how many lines you want to have in your poem and enter that number into the random order generator. For example, if you want 20 lines, you should ask the word generator for 20 words. Simply write all of these in a column and use each word as a starting word for your lines. The second option is a little more time-consuming, but it can help you take your poem and a lot of unique and unexpected directions. Instead of generating all the words at once, just start with one word. You can write whatever you want for the rest of the line. Then shuffle to find a new word and use that to start the next line. Repeat this process until you're happy with the length of the poem. Also, if you don't like one of the words that came up, try to avoid picking a new one and just work with what you have. That's gonna give me the most interesting results. 8. Editing Process: In this lesson, I'm going to be sharing with you my specific editing process for editing these types of poems. Even if you have your own standard editing process, you might want to use my process for these because I'm sure your rough drafts are looking a little bit chaotic. We need to bring things back into balance. The first step is to circle or highlight everything that you absolutely love and definitely want to keep. Then ask yourself, do you want to rewrite the poem to revolve around your favorite lines? Or do you want to leave most of the poem in? That will give you enough direction to move forward with the editing process. Now that you have a general sense of the direction you want to go in, the next step is to make it make sense. If you're only keeping your favorite parts of the poem, you might want to write a whole new poem around these parts. If you're leaving most of the poem and you might want to rearrange some things or add some filler words like that. And in a basically just do whatever you need to do is you bring some clarity into your poem. As you can see, I've highlighted girlfriends leave their partners for aliens. And I'm gonna make that the new theme for my new poem because I thought that was really interesting. I also highlighted intermediate chemistry because I thought those were cool and unique phrase that I've never heard before. Then the last thing I did was highlight a few extra other words that I want to try to incorporate. I don't have to incorporate them, but I feel like it'll help me rather than just working with a blank canvas. So as you can see, you don't need to keep your poem the same as it was before. You can really transform it into something completely new if you want. Once your column makes sense, the last step of editing is to make it extra beautiful. Depending on how happy you are with your palm already. This might take you a little bit of time or a long time. Some ways you can make your polymer beautiful include adding more imagery, adding more beautiful words, or taking out cliche phrases and replacing them with something more unique. 9. Conclusion: Thank you so much for watching my online course, letting go, introducing randomness into poetry. In this course, you've learned how to write a Lost and Found Poem. How to write a shuffled poem. Different ways you can incorporate random word generators into your poems. You also learned a few tips for overcoming writer's block, as well as editing. Now that you've tried all of these different techniques, I want you to reflect on which ones you want to use again in the future. Which ones were the most fun? Which ones were the most helpful? But even if you don't use any of these techniques, again, I hope you walk out of this class knowing you don't have to stick with the same writing routine every time. You can experiment and try new things. Also, remember to follow me on Skillshare. Leave me a review and publish your poems to the project board if you feel comfortable. Thank you again and I'll see you in the next course.