It’s been a delightful poeming month, an unexpected gift to
this summer. I’ve been both reading and writing poetry again and loving it.
Part of this is due to my reading “at” a couple of great
poetry resources, one old and one new-to-me (more on these in another post).
But part of it has just been a wonderful rekindling of a perennial love of
words. I find myself wanting to pick them up and marvel over them like
gemstones, wherever I happen to encounter them – in good prose or in poetry.
One way I can tell I’m in good poeming season (besides the
bouquet of poems blooming in my journal) is because I’m relaxing with some
wordplay exercises. While word play can refer to any sort of playing with
words, I tend to use it as a heading in my notebook for a particular kind of
writing exercise I started doing many years ago and return to whenever I’m
feeling particularly playful with language.
I don’t think this is an exercise I picked up anywhere in
particular, although I may have patched it together from dribs and drabs of
other writing exercises and prompts. Still I’ve honed it over the years,
finding new ways to relax into it each time I do it. It doesn’t have an exact
set of rules. I basically know what to expect when I go into the exercise, but
one of the fun parts is that I never really
know what to expect, because it always leads to such creative and varied
results.
Here are some of the parameters for the wordplay exercise as
I’ve developed it.
- Start
with culling a list of words from a book or any other bit of writing. This
will be your resource list. Your list can come from almost any type of
book or article – in fact, it can be fun to experiment with different
kinds of resources. I’ve pulled my list from magazines, history books,
poetry anthologies, and nature field guides. You could try it with a
favorite novel or a science text book. Sticking with one book is usually
my favorite way to do the exercise, both because it limits my choices and
because it delights me to see what a vast array of words you can find in
almost any resource. Poetry anthologies or collections are, of course,
some of the best for dipping into, since poets tend to use such concrete
and evocative language.
- Set a
limit for how many words you list. This can be any kind of limit – a “page’s
worth” (however you decide to write them on the page), a certain number of
words, a number of words within a given time frame, or a number of columns
of words. I like to write my lists in long columns down the page.
- Try
not to be too conscious of which words you’re choosing. This sounds harder
than it is, because once you’re in the groove of choosing words, you’ll
see how easy the choices are – it’s like picking fruit from branches. When
I say “try not to be too conscious,” I mean don’t go looking for words
with common sounds, or a set number of verbs or nouns or adjectives. But
don’t worry or be surprised if you find yourself clustering around certain
types of sounds or words. Let your pen write down whatever words your eye
falls on most naturally. Pick the word up mentally and let it roll around
your brain. If it feels good, jot it down; if it doesn’t resonate with you
in that moment, skip it and move on. If you find a word that you really
like but find yourself wanting to jot it in a different form, that’s OK
too. Recently I came upon the word “boisterously” but decided to drop the
“ly” and tuck away “boisterous” as an adjective. You can always go back
and ad the “ly” later when you’re using it, or change it in some other
way.
- If it
helps to prime your creativity, capture your words in colorful felt tip
markers or crayons, or alternate different colored ballpoints – one word
in blue, another in red, black, or green.
- Occasionally,
a poem may begin to form (chomping at the bit!) as you’re making your
list. If that happens, go ahead and run with it first thing.
- More
than likely, however, you will find yourself pausing for breath once
you’ve compiled the list, pleased just to sit there and look at it for a
minute. Like other things you collect, words can be beautiful in and of
themselves, each one as different and unique as shells or wildflowers. Let
yourself enjoy the collection.
- Get
ready to play! This is where I have to confess the guidelines break down a
bit. I don’t have a single approach to how I play with the list beyond
this: I begin to put words in groups (clusters, bevies, strings) on the
page. Sometimes I do this on the actual page where I wrote the list,
letting the words dance in the margins. Sometimes I do it on a facing
page. Sometimes I go for groupings via sight features and sometimes by sound.
Although there isn’t any set way to do this, here are a few possibilities
you might try to get started:
(a) Read
through the entire list, either silently or out loud, and let yourself notice
repeating sounds. Did you gravitate toward a lot of words that all started with
the same letter? Put them together. Did you happen to collect a lot of words
that major in long “i”s or short “a”s or long “o”s? Let them gather together
and see what happens.
(b) Group
words by form. Let your nouns huddle in one place, or divide them into concrete
nouns and more abstract ones. Encourage your adjectives to hang out together
and marshal your verbs into one force. Notice if you had a tendency to go for
certain forms like “ing” endings or plurals. Anything that makes these words
kin is game for a grouping strategy.
(c) Begin
to put together adjectives with nouns, even if they don’t seem to make logical
sense. Turn adjectives into nouns and vice versa. Silent can become silence and
kindness can morph into kind. Yes, you could end up with some trite expressions
– in my wordplay session earlier today, I did this and stumbled upon both golden silence and natural kinship (I think our brains are sometimes wired to make the
obvious connections) but push yourself and put words together willy-nilly,
whether they look like they belong together or not. You will end up with some
combinations you would never have come up with except in playful mode: relentless world, secret father, obstinate
rain.
(d) Look
for rhymes. Sometimes you won’t actually find any that occur naturally in your
list, but you’ll find words that want you to find rhymes for them. My
collection of “ing” words netted me the following: living, bleeding, glowing, meeting, which felt like they were
begging for a quatrain.
Once you’ve spent a while playing with the words of your
list, grouping them and re-grouping them, you will probably find poems or poem
lines start to come. The end goal of the exercise, for me at any rate, is not
usually a whole poem draft – though sometimes I end up with one. More often
than not, I come up with what I call “snippets” – potential lines of poems,
stanzas that might be built into something interesting later, or even just a
series of images that I can come back to.
Here’s example of a snippet I wrote in today’s wordplay
exercise:
the broken wing of
the boisterous bird
left him earthbound
but his music
was heard
in an echoing chant
that spilled
through the bones
and waltzed
through the woods
and scattered
the stones
One of the best parts of this exercise is that it helps me
to approach poetry from a different place: not just a playful place, but one in
which form takes precedence. Actually it’s not even form taking precedence, but
the words themselves. The words lead me into the poem, rather than an idea I want
to convey or even an image I feel compelled to describe. Those are fine places
to begin with in poetry, but sometimes I need to get back to words themselves.
The wordplay exercise shakes me loose from the typical ways I approach the
writing of a poem and pulls me into the music of language.
