Poetic Spam? The Quest for Inspiration

Write A Way: Journey to Creativity

 "You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you."   ~ Joseph Joubert

 Poetic Spam? The Quest for Inspiration

Where do you find your inspiration? Some people pull it deep from inside them. Others glean it from life experience. Or you can find it on the side of the road. When you are ready to express your creativity how do you do it? Do you write for two hours every day or grab your time on the bank line? Do rules govern your creativity? In a writing workshop, a participant refused to do one of the exercises because she didn't create it that way. She couldn't write unless she did it just her way, thus missing the opportunity for exploration. A schedule can provide you with a successful framework for a writing life or it can make writing dull and ordinary. Keep to your schedule but shake the tree every now and then and see what kind of fruit hits you on the head.

 "Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous." ~ Bill Moyers

Inspiration can be found anywhere if you look for it. Daily I weed through emails, separating out the friendly from the Spam. This task has frustrated, annoyed, and offended me. One day while visiting the Spam folder to see if friendly mail had been sucked into the void I noticed something. The subject lines of the offensive mail had some interesting configurations of words. At first, the poetry in them was not obvious. Taking the lines and linking them together I was able to create spontaneous poetry. Thinking outside of how you view the mundane can take you into these new avenues of expression. Poetry can be found anywhere if you aren't limited by what you think it should be. Just by looking at what before was annoying became an experiment in creativity that I might have missed.

"Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected." - William Plomer

We all have hidden or wide-open prejudices about what is good art, writing, performing. We have set ideas about how our own art should be created. Sometimes the most free-spirited artist can be the one that is the most restricted never allowing for a different point of view about what is good. Is your idea of good art limited to the masters like Da Vinci or Rembrandt? Do you find avant-garde theater is the only true theater? Someone's great art maybe a velvet Elvis portrait or dogs playing poker. Is your point of view limiting? Open your eyes to new possibilities and you may discover inspiration is everywhere. The trees speak to you, the sky paints you colors the earth opens up her secrets. The idea is to take what you normally do and change it around a little. Make life an adventure and be the grandmaster explorer of all the riches possible to you.

"The world is full of poetry. - The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, And sparkle in its brightness." ~ James Percival

Found Poetry is the rearrangement of words or phrases taken randomly from other sources (example: clipped newspaper headlines, bits of advertising copy, handwritten cards pulled from a hat) in a manner that gives the rearranged words a completely new meaning.

Creative Writing Prompts:

Be creative and read your own Spam mail subject lines (please don't open them - an adventure in virus-dom is not the goal). See if any of the words or lines interests you. Or using my Spam email subject lines see if you can create some poetry or even a tiny story out of them.

A swinish

Guys, feel eighteen again!

Stop fruit down

Small cap promo mover alert

Saleslady knee hole

Finally there's a way

Culprit erodible

Hot women doing crazy things

Sad dependent spoon

Autoregressive

Underbooked

Underwitholding

Authority relieve your strongest pain light

Spumoni taxi

Muscle bound guys become the biggest bottoms

while pole in wall is glory whole

Aching reckon apollonian declarator workplace civic

Here are my sample poems

Web-tribution: finding words all around

Muscle bound guys become the biggest bottoms

Underbooked and underwitholding

Take spumoni taxi

~*~

Autoregressive

Sad dependent spoon

Culprit erodible

Guys feel eighteen again

Finally, there's a way!

 ~*~

 Saleslady knee hole

A swinish

Stop fruit down

Lane of careful sliding

Depends on the knee

Are these brilliant poems? Not really. The point is to look for inspiration in unexpected ways and be willing to experiment and fail. Be willing to create bad writing. On the other side could be something brilliant.

In her essay Bad Writing, Julia Cameron gives us writers the task of going out and buying the tabloids we usually read secretively on the supermarket line. Julia suggests looking over some of your favorite titles and creating your own "tabloid" story. "Alien baby is my love child", "8,000 year-old man found buried alive in the desert", "Writer's fear stepping out of the ordinary", you get the idea. Have fun with it. Create outrageous tales. If you do it with abandon and a sense of fun you should find you are energized and want to return to your work.

Look for ways to expand how you create. If you paint try coloring with regular crayons or making collages out of found pictures. Create poetry by cutting words out of magazines. Create poetry with found pictures.

Creating should be deep, fun, joyous, exciting, and enlivening. Create with your arms wide open and allow inspiration to meet you in all places.