Scavenge for Poetry, Part I

Crows and low-effort creativity

Hey gang - If you were hoping for a channeled moon poem, please stay tuned for next time. I’ve been having headaches lately and honestly, I just wasn’t able to channel anything. Instead, I’m sharing a low-energy creativity exercise that I have really been loving lately: black-out poetry.

Sometimes, when I don’t have the energy to work on original writing, I tell myself to “scavenge for poetry.” Scavenging takes the pressure off — you just try to find use for things that already exist. You don’t have to build something from scratch or wait for downloads which can be fickle, especially if you’re not feeling well or the creative fires are low. Scavenging is not meant to be pretty or presentable or publishable. Like a vulture, you are simply alighting onto a dead thing and munching on what you find. Like a crow, you are pulling shiny treasures from the trash. There are no guarantees you will like what you end up with. The point is give yourself the medicine of doing something creative without over-exerting yourself or exacerbating burn-out.

Image by Ralph from Pixabay

One way to scavenge is to make black-out poetry. Even if you haven’t seen the work of Austin Kleon or Tom Phillips, I imagine most of us have seen images of censored documents and letters, where portions of the text has been blocked out by thick black lines. Once you see an example, you probably don’t need instructions on how to do black-out poetry, but just in case:

To scavenge, find one page of text that already exists in the world. You can literally use whatever writing you have around — a page from a draft you wrote that **sucks**, a passage from your favorite book, a piece of junk mail, the back of a cereal box. It does not matter.

Within that piece of writing, identify a word or phrase that seems interesting. Don’t overthink it. If it’s shiny, then you get to take it back to your nest. Next, take a big black marker (or a pencil if you don’t want to ruin the page) and cross out some words around that interesting bit. Jump around the document and keep finding the interesting bits and crossing out the fluff. You can try to make the pieces of text that remain connect somehow, or you can just find the pretty bits and not worry about coherence. Keep going until you run out of interesting phrases or it feels natural to stop. If you get stuck or frustrated, set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes and just go until the timer rings.

Remember, if you are going into this as a scavenger, the point is to do a quick exercise to give yourself the satisfaction of tending to your creativity, not to make a masterpiece. This is not something to stress and sweat over. I’ve found black-out poetry is also a great way to squeeze use out of a draft or passage you wrote that isn’t working, but you can’t bring yourself to toss quite yet. By keeping the shiny parts you really love, the piece often gets stronger through redaction.

Below is one of my black-out poems (fine-tuned) if you’re interested, but otherwise, I invite you to scavenge and rummage around a bit this week.

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gatekeepers 
let us say or make something 
something unsanctioned 
less friction and more access 
certain stories gain momentum 
reveal a pattern that wasn't visible before 

We have battles for a spotlight 
this is not coincidence 
that these are happening 
all at once

force breaking through 
perhaps in the forth wave 
millenial feminist witches 

a crisis then; there's not a word 
to describe the trouble now 
pay attention to our old violences 
the history books predict