ACTIVITY: Making a Star Field

This week's creative writing club activity was taken from an exercise developed by Christian Bök called Impromptu #16, which was hosted by The Found Poetry Review during a National Poetry Month activity in 2016, and which instructed us about how to create a field of stars based on a found text.

While Bök's exercise suggested using source material from an antiquarian astronomy text, in the interest of time (club members only meet for one hour each week), we used material from Astronomy Books Online. Follow the link above if you want to read more about how the star fields were made or just look at the amazing creations that follow! Don't you wish you were part of it?

dark spots are guaranteed to work

to make          dark spots
commonly appear          in middle age
of past sun          in dark and light patches
you need to know          uneven hate
or vortex          glass in the dark spot
appeared in the clouds          oceans
in the children's book          fade away
look radiant          by specks
grapefruit sun rose          sometimes concealing
existing          a lot of reasons
to minimize          the best glow

ACTIVITY: Write a Tritina

A tritina is a derivative form of a sestina. The tritina is a ten-line form that consists of three tercets and a concluding line. Like in a sestina, the last word of each line repeats, but in a different order. The final line includes all three of the words. For example:

1
2
3

3
1
2

2
3
1

123 or 321 or any combination thereof.

The numbers represent the words that should be repeated at the end of each line. The final line should include all three words in any order. Our variations may be slightly different, but this is the basic idea.

We tried to write tritinas using a uniform list of words: beat, sage and echo. What can you come up with? If you really want to challenge yourself, try a sestina!

This is a repost of a previous activity. Go here or here and read some other examples...

ACTIVITY: Write about Smoke

In today's meeting, we chose a theme to write about: smoke. Read what we wrote...

ACTIVITY: Found Writing Using Word Strips

Today, I brought some glue sticks and a large collection of word strips--pages of text that had been cut into their individual lines of text. After sifting through them, club members assembled the word strips into visual word collages.

Tami asked how long it took to cut all the paper because, like the computer in "EPICAC" by Kurt Vonnegut, I had brought enough word strips "for the next 500 years." I explained that it was something that a few other teachers and former students worked on many years ago when we had had some free time.

Take a look at our of the results below...

ACTIVITY: Imitation

Today, we imitated "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. Take a look at the original poem and try to create your own version.

You can see some of our results below. In fact, if you like what you read, please, leave a comment!

ACTIVITY: List Images w/ Colors

This week, Creative Writing Club members made lists. Imagery is at the heart of good poetry, and making lists of random images often produces surprising results. Also, trying to find a way to look at the things around us--things that, perhaps, on a daily basis, we don't notice too closely--might help us make some kind of discovery about where we can find images and about how to arrange them.

To construct our lists, we walked around the LAS Building and wrote down what we saw. We imposed the constraint of including a color in every observation that we added to our lists. For additional effect, some of us included pictures of our observations.

Read some of our results below...

ACTIVITY: Insomnia

Do you have sleepless nights? How do you deal with them? What keeps you up at night? Today's activity focused on this theme.

We met, as usual, pooled our ideas together and then voted for one that we would all work on, which was insomnia. Read our responses below...

ACTIVITY: Search Results Found Writing

The Creative Writing Club activity this week started with a Google search. We chose two words to use as our search terms ('hands' and 'window'), entered them into the search field and then arranged, collaged or otherwise manipulated the results from our searches to form a piece of writing. Read the results below...

cloud products

my cynicism had evaporated

a visible symbol of the pressures
paralyzed by superstitious dread

you don't need a savior
to wear a disposable glove

Alice
in a gesture of wordless comfort
using various washing methods
doesn't correspond with your hand's actual location

in the downstairs bathroom
in a basked from a window
in the wall
in the glass industry

be someone who reaches out to know and serve others
learn more about vectors
contagious viral illness
blood splatter and a corner
of her pillow

two acrostics

ACTIVITY: Erasure

Find an article and delete, mar or remove words to create a new word order. Post a picture of your manipulation. Cite your source.

ACTIVITY: Recipe

Write an alternative recipe...

Activity: Write a Cinquain

This week's activity focuses on using a form of a cinquain to convey the message. Using syllables or words, the form follows this pattern for each line: 2, 4, 6, 8, 2. Two cinquains, one flipped over and stacked on top of the other, may be used to create a butterfly cinquain, as well.

to return

ACTIVITY: Create a Star Field

This week's creative writing club activity was taken from an exercise developed by Christian Bök called Impromptu #16, which was hosted by The Found Poetry Review during a National Poetry Month activity last year, and which instructed us about how to create a field of stars based on a found text.

While Bök's exercise suggested using source material from an antiquarian astronomy text, in the interest of time (club members only meet for one hour each week), we used material from Astronomy Books Online. Follow the link above if you want to read more about how the star fields were made or just look at the amazing creations that follow! Don't you wish you were part of it?

ACTIVITY: Spaghetti Strip Found Poems

Magazine articles were cut into word strips. Club members took handfuls of word strips and arranged them into spaghetti strip found poems. See there results below...

Words were taken from National Geographic magazine articles from October 2016 through June 2016.

ACTIVITY: Ten by 10 by X by

Start at a book in the library. Turn to the tenth page. Count down to the tenth line and copy down the line and the source. Repeat the process ten times.

When finished, use the words as your "word bank" and collage something together.

1687

telling was a White European other story

falling into college

working to protect his colleagues
poor women and children of labouring classes
presented the great black circle route besides which war effort

therefore their test scores were collected, published, aired on television
part business temple

among magnificent faces

being taken from Turks

fishing in battle

--
Sources
The Freud Reader - edited by Peter Gay; Am I OK? - Carol C. Nadelson; Stereotypes and Prejudice - edited by Charles Stengor; The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould; Critical Thinking: Building the Basics - Timothy L. Walter, Glenn M Knudsuig, Donald E.P. Smith; Modern Historiography - Michael Bentley; With Courage and Common Sense - edited by Susan Wittig Albert and Dayna Finet.

ACTIVITY: Write a Tritina

A tritina is a derivative form of a sestina. The tritina is a ten-line form that consists of three tercets and a concluding line. Like in a sestina, the last word of each line repeats, but in a different order. The final line includes all three of the words. For example:

1
2
3

3
1
2

2
3
1

123 or
321

The numbers represent the words that should be repeated at the end of each line. The final line should include all three words in one of the two suggested orders. Our variations may be slightly different, but this is the basic idea.