Progress: Yesterday I wrote an incomplete first draft of a poem about a nightmare I’d had the night before, which involved this gigantic hairy spider leaping onto my head and laying her egg sacs in my hair. What I have of the poem is pretty good, I think, for a first draft, but there’s four or five little blank where I need a better image than what I have. I’ll come back to it in May and make it (I hope) brilliant. Today I’m planning to try my version of N+7, in which I replace nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs (I have lists of each) and only keep the sentence structure, and then use the resulting hot mess with its occasional serendipitous accidents as a springboard to write something that makes sense, on “Elegy for Sol LeWitt” by Ann Lauterbach, which is the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day poem for today.
Prompt for today: Join me. Pick a poem you like and do an N+7 and then craft something sensible out of it.
Mirrored at Vary the Line.
2 Comments
So … you have a list that you use to replace all the nouns, verbs, etc. Do you get to pick what you are replacing them with, or is it a pick of the draw thing where you randomly pick something?
I am intrigued. I used to do something like this with colours when I was doing art. I’d pick an object/aspect of the drawing that I wanted to colour, randomly pick a colour to use for that and then force myself to use that colour no matter how ridiculous or gross it was. Needless to say, I have had some interesting results :p
I wonder if someone has invented a art version of NaPoWriMo?
There’s a 365 photos in 365 days thing that people on flickr do. I’m not sure if there’s a month-long thing but I bet if you looked you’d find something. Or you could start one!
I like the idea of the colours in your art. I bet some of them ended up looking really cool.
With N+7 you’re supposed to use the noun that is the seventh after the noun you’re replacing. It was invented before the internet, so people were using dictionaries, although I just have lists of words in Word, which has the advantage of splitting the words up into nouns, adjectives, etc., and also of shortening the look-up times (because I can use Word’s Find function instead of manually looking it up). There’s a hilarious N+7 version of “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200204/rose (It’s the one that starts “I wandered lonely as a crowd.”) As you can see N+7 is only replacing nouns but I replace everything because only replacing the nouns results in something far too derivative. Also I cheat a lot by using the 6th or 8th or whatever word if it results in a really awesome phrase.
So far I have a lot of garbage, but this wonderful line: “whatever it is we remember/is always a kind of honey, touchable, able to be grabbed” and have decided my resulting poem will be about kissing so I can use that.