Have you ever had one of those moments when you feel completely and utterly uncreative, yet you still want to write a poem? If you are a poet of any sort, I'm sure you feel my pain. It happened to me not too long ago, and I was hit with an idea that ended up being more successful than I imagined.
There's no real name for this poetry technique, so I will call the use of it the "uncreative approach."
Using the uncreative approach, poets create poems using stanzas or lines of their already existing poetry to create a new poem all on its own. It's easy to do this; all it takes is opening up your notebook or scavenging through word documents on your computer and plucking out lines from your old poems that can be combined and become something beautiful. (or depressing, in the case of the poem I was able to create using some of my old work.)
Here's what I was able to come up with using two-line segments from poems I've written in the last four years.
I'm a tattered, broken, helpless mess
With bloody bleeding from my chest
When I look into the broken glass
I can see the smashed and shattered past
My reflection stares back at me; it taunts me, it lies
For where my face should be is a mask of disguise
Sometimes people are much more than they appear
As if their reflection is in a double sided mirror
But I'm losing touch with who I am, or rather who I was
I tried so hard to win the war (somehow love always does)
Why is this so hard for me?
While for others, there's no difficulty
It seems as if when you left, you took a part of me
All that's left is tattered hope and painful misery
I'm spiraling again - somebody help me, please
It's too controlling for me to handle - it attacks like a disease
It's that moment when I feel my heart breaking
That horrid feeling as my body starts shaking
My heart is pounding, thud thud thud
My veins are pumping all my blood
But the jerking current is far too strong
And it pushes undesired actions along
Lonely times are breaking up my heart
Suicidal thoughts are tearing me apart
Waking up just to fall asleep again
Righting a wrong even though I still will sin
A corpse, burned into nothingness
Ashes wanting to be put to rest
Every single line from that poem can be found in the Times in other articles I've written. I will give 500k to whoever can list the 14 poems I used to write that poem and send the list to me in a ymail. All 14 are under the category 'Creative writing', so that narrows down your search to only 131 choices. Everyone who gets at least 12 poems right and send me a y-mail with the list will win 25k for their effort.
I encourage you to write an Uncreative Poem of your own and submit it to the Times. Who knows - you may find that being uncreative takes a lot more creativity than you thought!
Happy writing (and searching!)
