Free Idea Factory

Take something that you really value, that you personally have made (a poem, a painting, a sculpture, what ever…) and break it. Discard it and don’t look back. You can always remake something (though you will need to learn to become comfortable with it being slightly different (for better or worse).

Often times I have found that clinging on to ‘a masterpiece’ (and most of the time it’s really not, though it may be a personal triumph, which is surely nothing to discount) inhibits you from producing 10 new things of which 4 might be to your liking. And maybe 2 are of equal or greater merit than the first object you parted with. That’s a 50% increase in masterpieces!

When we hold onto past ideas too tightly, it may very well inhibit us from coming up with new ones. Creativity involves a need to develop. Being creative involves an element of never being completely satisfied. That’s not to say that the process won’t be rewarding though. Nothing is ever really done in my opinion as far as art goes. But it can be developed enough to share with others. When that’s the case, finish out the body of work or move on to the next idea.

This idea was born out of experiences I had with Skip Sensbach of Green Dog Pottery in Dallas, Pa. He was the one who introduced me to breaking pots, sculptures, and a host of other things I liked. My favorite piece that I broke was a 2 foot tall wine cask that was shaped like a womans leg with fishnet stockings.

Variation:
To reduce the wasteful element of breaking something of value (which I’m personally OK with because of what it may yield) you can give away the object as well. Or you can break it and reuse those broken pieces to make something even cooler if your up for the challenge.

I’d like to assemble a manuscript by theft. Take one poem each from a range of modern poetry books of the type that strike me as interchangeably blah. Truly interchange them by taking this random sampling and randomizing the order of the poems within a manuscript that I’d then send out (with its previously published credits intact, because you know nobody’s double-checking those) under a pseudonym to various publishers to see if I could get it accepted. Withdraw it every time its accepted and just keep score.

Hi folks
Sometime may get round to this. Project involving printing the word `HERE` in large letters on a piece of cloth, placing it in various places in the landscape and photographing it. Use the map reference as title for each piece.

Organizing readings here locally we’re always talking about what we can do to make it more than just an open mic, to give people a good solid reason for coming out. Having a feature + an open mic is a good combination. Having a theme seems to work, too. Combining with music or dance or some other art form also helps put butts in the chairs. Anyway, as we were brainstorming event ideas we came up with one good idea.

Everybody has at least one poem that drops the F-bomb. Performers will often express a concern over whether it’s appropriate or not to read that poem at any given event.

We’re thinking it could work (and be a heckuva fun evening, and a decent crowd draw) to host an evening of nothing but poems that have the word “fuck” in them. If the poem doesn’t drop the F-bomb, it can’t be read. No exceptions. So, that’s part one of the idea: an evening devoted to dropping the F-bomb. Everyone walking in knows what to expect, everyone reading knows what they can uncork, and a good time is had by all.

Here’s where it gets better.

I think so many people have great poems that drop the F-bomb that the evening could be structured NOT as a “show up with your F-bomb poem” and sign up to read, but, instead, submit your F-bomb poem to an editor who could hand select the best ones so it’s an event that has some fucking standards!

It gets better still.

If this event were to occur, say, once a month or so, then at the end of the year, all the poems selected by the editor could appear in a print anthology.

And finally…

One thing that’s sure to happen if you remove the “open mic” aspect and go with a straight platform of preselected readers is a decrease in audience. So to address that fact, the evening gets structured as
only mostly preselected readers and then there’s an open mic to follow. The best poem from the open mic (as judged by audience response) earns a wildcard entry into the anthology.

Picture one of those waist-high in plastic balls pools like they have in some of the playlands for children. But each ball has a word written on it like they put numbers on lottery balls. And each ball is wrapped with strips of Velcro hook fabric. The walls of the space are covered in Velcro loop fabric. Jump in, swim around, fling poems onto the walls.

I recently visited a friends used book store. I purchased a book about Alex Katz mostly because another artist I know, Henry Long, autographed it. I like Alex Katz’s work, but I am more amused by Henry’s signing a book that he did not contribute to producing.

The bookshop owner noted that most people hate other people writing in books. We both felt differently. There is a personal history to the hurried comments left in margins, inscriptions, etc. I often find these elements more intriguing than the book itself.

My friend told me of a book she had purchased. It contained a womans intimate details about her feelings during a divorce as it related to the content of the book.

There are often stories in other stories, and there are even stories about those stories. This idea, which I offer to you, is to go buy a used book with notes or comments in it. Get into the former readers head and develop a new body of work based on your reading, experience, and imagination. May you take with you a piece of someone else’s personal history and create a new piece of your own.

I’ve been listening to a wide range of sound work for a couple of years, from the most experimental to the most basic. One thing I noticed is that there is a large expanse of territory that is not being mapped by people. On one border there are poets who are taking what are basically page-poems and recording themselves reading them. On the other border are sound poets who are working with pure sound at the syllable/phoneme and even completely non-lexical non-verbal levels (grunts and screeches and moans and whimpers oh my!). The territory that is in between these two extremes is both rich, varied, (I think) thrilling to consider, and, is surprisingly vacant. There aren’t very many talented poets doing experimental work with sound (some, not many). There are poets doing sound work, but it’s very conservative—straight voice recordings. There are experiments being done, but, it’s more pure theoretical experimentation than something connected with poetry. This is not bad, I think both groups are doing useful work, but, what I want to see and do is make some excursions into audio augmentation of poetry and into writing poetry specifically to leverage the possibilities of sound performance. I want the best of both worlds.

My first efforts involved weaving and simultaneity (because I’d been working with those on the page and so was really doing audio interpretations of visual tropes). This got me thinking about the full range of affects that are possible. Here’s a few, in no particular order, with some brief notes to sketch out what I mean by each. These are not discrete classifications; I think many aspects of sound work are shades of these in combination. Many are also admittedly similar, this is just a quick brainstormed list that I’m tossing out here so there’s a kind of vocabulary in place to talk about where my current interests are.

Layers—having multiple levels of sound going on. Can be many voices, voices and sound effects, same voice on an additional track to add depth, etc. I am hugely interested in doing things with as many layers as possible. Like Brian Wilson’s arrangements on the album Smile.

Choral—the specific effect of many voices in different tonal registers, in harmony our out of harmony. Layers of voices.

Simultaneity—when things happen at the same time. So far, my experience with your work has seen augmentive simultaneity (voices at the same time saying the same thing in different deliveries to add to the overall effect). My work has shown some narrative simultaneity where different lexical streams are run at the same time, so far they’ve usually been supportive more than augmentive of each other. I am very interested in doing work where the simultaneous elements are more radically augmentive. I’d like to write some pieces that augment through shaded semantic broadening in addition to emphasis adding restatement. Or, to say it more plainly, in addition to voices repeating a word in time with the main line reading I’d like to have fireworks of words not in the main line that burst and crackle in appropriate places (eventually maybe everywhere, throughout).

Emphasis—any effect (repetition, layer, etc.) that serves to direct attention to a specific point.

Augmentation—this means, to me, things that are additive. Multiple intonations of the same phrase augment each other. They add to the sum total. The word means all the things at once.

Multiple voices—refers both to literally more than one person’s voice as well as altered versions of the same voice, or even unaltered versions of multiple instances of the same voice.

Cumulative—a way to talk about the end result of complex layerings. For example, if a phrase were read by multiple voices in a variety of ways we might say that the cumulative effect of the various readings was pitched towards the angry, or the manic, even though some, most, or all of the individual layers don’t exhibit that effect. Another sense is that multiple layers of voices have a cumulative choral effect.

Alteration—one point at which the studio and the technology become an instrument in the performance. Altering is when something is done to the voice or the recording that is not present in the original. Raising the pitch, speeding it up, adding reverb, even looping would qualify, really. All post-production, too, for the most part.

Affectation—this is what the voice can do with stage direction and actorly talent, it can do an affected reading that is augmentive or oppositional to the main line, among other things.

Spatiality—mixing technology can place any given voice or effect within a fairly precise physical location in the audio space of the listener. Left/right, front/back, and everything in between, including motion through that space. I really want to explore this aspect.

Sound Effects—not voice things. Think radio plays, or, the whoosh sounds recorded from the fan.

Looping—taking any segment and repeating it at regular or irregular intervals.

Character Dialog—one interesting aspect of multiple voices and layers is the possibility for character dialog in a theatric fashion (or some other fashion). This is the boundary between experimental theater and experimental sound poetry.

Weaving—taking multiple threads of logic, textstream, semantic content, voices, whatever and running them concurrently. If no attempt is made to modulate which of the multiples is forefront the audience will attempt to do it on their own (with varying degrees of successs).

Opposing/Contrasting—the corollary to the augmentive, these are elements which oppose or contrast the main line in some way. If the main line says “yes, yes, yes” then a faraway “nooooo” would be a contrasting element. A cluster of faraway and approaching “nooooo”s might have the cumulative effect of actually semantically overpowering the main line.

What aspects have I missed? Many, I’m sure.

I am interested in doing pieces that are deeply layered and explore the possibilities of modulating poetic meaning by various effects and affectations through complex arrangements in time and space of augmentive and opposing semantic clusters that eventually so completely subvert the main line that time becomes the only real line.

I want poems that are like fireworks where word clusters burst in audiospace to form new, more complex, semantic units (two-dimensionally impossible “words”) that can be connected together by the line of time into lines, stanzas and poems that articulate the fullness of expression poetry has been trying to achieve all along.

I want to take the next step and be writing poems to take advantage of the new set of tropes studio recording with the help of like-minded others makes available.

I want to make poems that make people slip off their headphones, out of breath, disoriented, and muttering to anyone who’ll listen “now that’s a goddamned poem.”

This is an idea for a group blog/ e-journal journal called Photogenesis. The premise would be developing textual content from images. Rather than developing editorial copy and later adding supporting visual material, it would be the reverse. The image would be determined, then the content would be born out of the image.

The notion was born out of the idea of ekphrasis, a form of art that tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form. This concept was developed through a discussion with a friend, Jim O’Conell of Resource Media, a branding and creative design studio.

Issue Variations:

-Based on random stock photo’s
-Based on found images
-Based on political ideology
-Based on history
-Based on sexist images
-Literary artists choose images, visual artists write the words 1/2 of issue, other 1/2 is the reverse
-Have psychoanalysts draw images and have children analyze them based on their images
-You get the idea… If you want more ideas, feel free to email me if you choose to take this project on.

Interrobang

It’s a punctuation mark that combines the exclamation point with the question mark. Looks like this: ‽

More info at the Wikipedia page for interrobang.

This is an idea for a group blog literary journal called (in my idea) subgenre. It would be built by editors willing to provide content in their chosen narrowed range, but it would be open to a nearly unlimited set of narrowed ranges–if what the editor does puts in them contact with a steady stream of some particular kind of poem and they felt they could manage to select one for featuring every month or so, then they’d be qualified. As a starting point, consider the following: concrete poetry, visual poetry, lyric poetry, formal poetry, haiku, doggerel, digital poetry, poetry in translation, language poetry. But do not
be limited by these. The editor’s ability to provide an example a month would be sufficient to declare it a viable category.