Free Idea Factory

There are a lot of potholes in our roads here. Seems like an awful lot of untapped poetential.

A couple of ideas:

• Create some sort of jack-in-the-box springed device, with a word attached to the top. Place it in the pothole. Attach a cover. When driven over, the cover should lift and the word should pop up.
• Line the pothole with tyvek that has a poem written on it.
• Cover the pothole with tyvek that has a drawing or a word on it. For best effect, find a road with multiple potholes so you can compose an entire work - be it a poem or a series of drawings that fit together in some way.
• Or, just get a bunch of those googly eyes and glue them to the inside of the pothole. Hundreds of them. Creepyfun.

Turn your friend’s trash into domestic treasure. Over the course of a year as you visit your friend’s homes, pick up any ephemera out of their trash (bathroom, kitchen, stuff on floor). Keep this private. Tuck it in your pocket and don’t say a word. When you bring it home, add it to your collection. Wallpaper a small room in your house with it all. At the end of the year, invite your pals over for a party. Serve drinks from your newly papered room.

You might lose a few friends, or make them closer.

Paper a small room in your house with ephemera found out on the streets of your neighborhood.

That’s all. No deep meaning, other than you’ll feel closer to your neighbors. Maybe.

Attach large pages together at their four corners with jewelry loops to create one enormous sheet that will move in the wind beautifully. Write something on those pages, or paint them. A quilt of words. Hang it out on someone’s clothesline in the middle of the night. Sneak off.

I write short(er) poems. In crit, I often receive a comment like “I’d like to see more here.” Sometimes it’s legit. I jumped out of a murky pool of the subconscious because it got too, well, scary in there. The suggestion for rewrite is always “why don’t you continue where you left off and…” And what? Ramble on directionless? No thanks.

While leading an adult writing group recently, one of the participants wrote a similar “jumping away” poem. There was more to be said. Instead of suggesting she continue on where she left off, I asked her if she’d be comfortable trying this instead:

Write the poem out again, leaving plenty of room between the lines.
Respond to each line individually and see what happens - maybe a new revelation, or maybe the poem takes off in a completely new direction.

The point is, you’re not just jumping back into the same murky pool.

and paint a dead tree blue.