Free Idea Factory

Following posts about aiding the creative process. My old life-drawing teacher made an exercise, whereby the model moved to a new position every 20 seconds. The students had to produce a new image for each pose. She went on to say that if you saw someone jump off a ten story building, the truly confident artist would have drawn them before they hit the ground.
I suggest an excercise , whether artist or writer, sit in a cafe or restaurant where you can see people walking past through the window. Sketch, or write a description phrase, for the next person you see each time you look up from the last - as many people as possible over ten minutes. You should end up with a notebook full of material. An excercise in beating hesitancy and building confidence.

A watch whose dial, instead of being divided into 12 hours that repeat twice, and shows minutes 60 seconds long, is divided into the 26 letters of the roman alphabet, and shows minutes 52 “seconds long” (upper and lower case). No more “one thirty”, instead we can say it’s about “L after C”, or “I’ll be there in a few letters.” or “I have to work until F.”

write a short poem and then change it in every way visually and systematically. make it a left-based spaced poem, center it, add spaces, make it vertical. spin it round, set it in motion if you can. i use an old program called microsoft photodraw to do this, but there are others.

I noticed that Christian Wiman, the current editor of Poetry magazine, has a new book out in stores. How fun would it be to type in all of the poems in that book, and then run a full concordance on the text to extract the complete vocabulary used in it, and then write a few new poems that use only the re-arranged language contained in that book, and then submit those poems to Poetry for consideration.

Last post reminded me of another big idea. Night time. Have someone stationed in each room of a very large building and be in contact by radio/mobile phone with them all. By having them control the lights in their room, spell out letters and words pixel style. A performance seen over a whole city.

Not exactly illusions of grandeur, but always wanted to write the Biggest Poem in the World. 500m letters, 1 mile long phrases, about two or three miles out from a busy airport, so that it can be read from the air. Might help nervous flyers.

A black t-shirt with white printing, in that all too familiar font from the ridiculously regularly ripped-off slogan Got Milk that reads simply: Got It.

if you have or can get a good digital recorder, you can do it that way:
carry it around with you and record the various whooshes of water and traffic, clicks and clacks and whacks of movement…

if you have no recorder, spend a day focusing on sound as you wander…translate it into text.

start a poem or story or doodle what have you and mail it to buddy a. buddy a will add a bit and pass it to buddy b and so on. could be just two people or more…

a variation of this is to play the surrealist exquisite corpse game thru the mail…via postcards or letters.

i love the idea of mail art.

You know those Tibetan prayer wheels, which spin in the wind. I always wanted to make some with text around the rim. They can be left out, so the poems are always being performed.