Creative Writing

Found Poem: Predictive text Helper

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
“Before anxiety, breathe.” Found redacted poem (that’s a prompt for another day) by one of my ninth graders. I ran it through a filter for some color. I love how she got to that last word and decided she needed to manipulate the word to suit her purposes.

Here’s a little refresh for the page: Poetry Prompts!

A few days ago, I re-tolled a fun prompt I sometimes use to get myself out of a rut, using predictive text to break me out of my overused words and rhythms. Wordplay and found poetry help me to find new ways to breathe into a poem, and sometimes offer profoundly new ways of expression. “Let go of the reins of the horse of your brain, and let it wander where it wants to for a while,” I sometimes tell my students. I find that the beautiful balance of letting go, and being ready to step in and actively create (as my student did in the image above) not only informs my poetic process, but my living as well.

So here are some initial ideas for using predictive text to restart your poetic mojo. If you don’t think of yourself as a poet (I disagree, btw–if you put words together in your own way, you are a poet), you can use these exercises to play and explore language. I’ll call the prompts Games, just to make it clear that we’re starting playing here.

One note before we begin: Each Game has rules. Try to follow them, to give the game a little structure and challenge. But be ready to break them if the Poem Gnome taps you on the shoulder and suggests you try something different.

Game 1:
You’re going to write a six- or eight-line poem. You are in charge of the word or short phrase that begins each line. Then let predictive text finish the lines for you. Here’s an example, with my words in bold. Of course, I have stolen the words for this one, for the sake of play:
Roses are the only thing I need.
Violets are the only thing I have.
Sugar and honey roasted figs with you
And now I’m waiting for the bus.
So are you.
So it will be.

Game 2:
Let’s try the same thing, only alternating words with the predictive text. I find this one creates more tension as I try to direct the predictive text. I actually fought it a little and changed the predictive text generator’s (PTG’s) “look” to “looked.” And I actually let the PTG suggest “whenever” instead of the “when” I was considering.
Wafting to the bottom of Pandora’s pool,
my little feather was almost ready for you.
Dreams of her own box of possibilities
flew out of the grove in the rain,
and now she has forgotten about her last lover,
how the clouds looked whenever he was leaving.

NOTES:
1. You might notice, like I do, that you find yourself backtracking and choosing different words in order to force the PTG to offer you better choices. Feels like chess with the computer.
2. Maybe what you came up with, like mine, is laughable trash. But maybe it gives you an idea for something to do next with your own line breaks and cadences. Steal that and run with it!
3. Likely the poem itself it not a publishable gem. But perhaps there’s a line in there that sings? Take it an spin it into another poem of your own!
4. I love that the PTG gave me “Pandora’s,” but I didn’t want to let it force me into using “box.” But my work in the poem quickly became about telling Pandora’s story. I think I should change the “my” to “her.”

Gratitude List:
1. The wild creatures of Goldfinch Farm.
2. Although there is a lot to accomplish in my summer days, I like how I can choose and plot the course with my own intentions.
3. This lavender-filled collar that I put in the freezer and then wear about my neck when the heat feels overwhelming.
4. These teenagers. I love their company, quiet and reserved as it is. Comfortably being together in the house.
5. The creative urge. Making stuff.
May we walk in Beauty!

Labels and Longings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Getting ready for a new semester. Putting the old one to bed. Caught in the web of behindness that has been my truth for this entire semester. Recognizing my own responsibility in that, how my disorganization and distractedness were a big part of it, how the Big Task gets bigger as it gets put off. Also trying to give myself a break because of the outer dramas of these months: pandemic, election, insurrection.

What labels do I choose for myself?
Lazy. Procrastinator. Mildly depressed. Present in the Moment. Creative.

How do I see myself differently depending on how I choose my labels, and will a different label actually help me to get my work done more efficiently so I can really enjoy the non-work times in my life? How does that clementine in my picture change identity based on whether it wears the label scurvy or winsome? What happens to my sober and hard-working great-grandparents if I label them dance? Or if I label my great-great-grandmother, who midwifed children into the universe and lived according to the gentle order of the Mennonite Church, chaos?

The photos are part of a project I did with my Creative Writing classes last year, and I am tweaking and improving on for this year. We wrote dozens of words on little cards, and then we took photos of them labeling objects in our world. It was a way to try to push students into using language creatively. As I reflect on my own images from last year, I feel attached to them, as if they’re poems of their own.

Three Gratitudes:
1. The sky was absolutely alive this morning when we got to school! Geese and crows winging across the grey at angles, honking and grawking. A little flock of twittery folk above the crows, beating faster, but only just keeping pace with the slow-rowing crows. An anxious family of doves, flushed noisily from the juniper tree, wings whooshing and voices crying, “Oh dear!”
2. I think I am going to catch up with myself. And then Wednesday is a new day, semester-wise. (Is there something else happening on Wednesday?)
3. Creative projects. I am eager to offer my classes a deeper level of creative projects next semester, and hopefully that will enable us all to keep our minds and hearts more carefully tuned to the work.

May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with Beauty!

“The mystic sits inside the burning.” —Rumi (Barks)

“Writing is the painting of the voice; the closer the resemblance, the better it is.” —Voltaire

“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” —Dalai Lama

“Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.” —Diane Ackerman

“In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. Here we are moving toward the exit of the 20th century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice. The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?”
~Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail (1963)

Beets are Deadly Serious

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This is a photo of a poster in the dining room at the National Conference Center. I love Jitterbug Perfume. I need to try to figure out how to use this as a basis for a Creative Writing exercise in descriptive and fanciful writing. It’s so imaginative, it goes way out beyond extended metaphor. Part of it is the wild riff on beets themselves, and part of it is the repeated comparison to the characteristics of other vegetables.

And that last line. Suddenly beet people are desperate, perhaps visionary, perhaps utterly mad.

Try it. Choose a random thing, a thing among things, something you can compare to other items in a similar category: paper clips, Legos, dogwood tree. Describe it, in terms of itself, but also in terms of the other things in its category. Who exemplifies the characteristics of your item? Remember that you really aren’t describing an item at all, but a person.

Gratitude List:
1. Kitty snuggles. (Except at 3 in the morning. No, even that is sweet, if disruptive. Thor seems to have some anxiety issues related to Mama going away. He kept waking me up. He wanted to perch on top of me–shoulder, hip–but seemed to need to hold on with his claws. Sigh. Still, midnight purrs and kitty kisses are precious.)
2. Being home. Being away, and then being home again.
3. Making plans, making progress toward goals.
4. Morning sun.
5. The moon, the moon, the moon.

May we walk in Beauty!