Want to be my Guinea pig?

This is less dangerous than being a test pilot

Dear Creative,

I hope you’re enjoying the changes in the weather. As a poet, especially as a haiku poet, I’m supposed to love spring.

Confession: spring is my least favorite season. I get that it’s a nice change of pace after a long and dreary winter. However, I have horrible allergies. Spring for me is about sinus headaches, sneezing, and getting at least one sinus infection.

My favorite season is summer. I love the hot sun, and most of nature has finished pollinating by then. Plus, I love that my kids are free from their daily school routines. Time slows down a bit. There’s more time to look up at the stars and to sit on the front porch and watch the bats come out to chase the moths.

I have some big creative plans for the summer. I’m working on finishing up two haiku-related projects, and I’m creating a virtual poetry workshop for people who want to write poetry but think that they don’t know how to.

I’m developing an exercise I want to use as part of the workshop, but I need some help testing it out. Would you be willing to be a Guinea pig for me? It’s a fairly short exercise.

Here it is:

Step 1: Write a paragraph where you describe how to make a sandwich. It can be any kind of sandwich you want, and your directions can be as simple or as complex as you want.

Step 2: Take your paragraph and put a line break in the middle of each sentence. Here’s an example of what your paragraph should look like now:

First, you need two
slices of sourdough bread. Make sure
the slices are about
 the same size.
Toast the bread. Put some leftover
pork roast on a plate and top it with
BBQ sauce. Heat the meat for
one minute in the microwave. Next, you need to
spread mustard on one slice
and mayo on the other. Mix the meat into
the BBQ sauce after heating it.
Spread the pork onto one slice
and put a piece of sharp cheddar cheese
on the other slice. Close the sandwich
and heat in the microwave for
another 30 seconds to melt the cheese.
Cut the sandwich in half if you wish,
and then enjoy!

(Most lines will be sentence fragments)

Step 3: Think of something you want to teach someone (or teach yourself) how to do that is not making a sandwich. The more abstract, the better. Maybe you want to teach someone how to achieve their dreams, how to deal with grief, or how to retain a sense of childlike wonder.

Pick something that feels interesting or alluring to you.

Step 4: Go back to your sandwich instructions in step two and replace all or most of the sandwich details with the idea you had in step three. For example, if you are teaching someone how to be better at taking criticism of their work, you might change the first couple of lines of the example in step two like this:

First, you need two
trusted art friends. Make sure
the friends understand
you want your work
to be better.

Step 5: Once you’ve changed all the lines, go back and clean it up. You can alter the line breaks, change your imagery, and anything else, except you cannot put it back into paragraph form.

I’d love to read your poems if you want to try it! Feel free to put your poems in the comments. If you have any feedback about how to improve the exercise, please let me know that too!

This exercise is interesting because it shows you what a poem is. Your paragraph in step one is not a poem. After step two, you have something that looks like a poem, but it is still just a set of instructions for making a sandwich. It’s step four where you turn your sandwich instructions into an analogy for something else that you first see a poem.

The more time you spend on step five, the sharper your poem will be. I’ll put my poem made from my sandwich instructions in the comments.

This exercise also works well with changing recipes or any other algorithmic set of instructions into a poem.

I hope you spend some time today making something!

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason