Sometimes you might find little snatches or phrases bombling around in your head. On their own they are not a poem but if you don’t do something with them they may well evaporate out of your brain and be lost altogether. And though they are not poems they are the seeds of poems.
What we here at WoPo find useful is to get an old money box or pick up a cheap one from a charity shop or car boot sale. Place it somewhere easily accessible and put a stack of non sticky post it notes next to it. Then when ever you end up with a phrase or sentence fragment or just two words that sound unusual but right together – write them down on the post its, fold them up and pop them into the money box.
This is similar to the Inspira jar and several other exercises, so if you have such a hoard of little paper scraps or post-its then you might want to raid it for some extra poetry help!
This photograph is of a small lake in Essex – what does it say to you? Do like lakes or fear them? What is at the bottom of it? Can you imagine why the photographer was there?
Spend 10 minutes jotting down the feelings or back story to the photo.
It might seem like a cheesy daft idea but get yourself some fridge poetry – the more the better. Then lay it all out on a nice clear fridge or magnetic white board. You will find that words start just jumping out at you and you automatically start form sentences and phrases. After a while you will have fridge full of fragments and snatches of sentences, some of these will be strange but evocative combinations of words which you may well not have thought of.
Write these down on post it notes that you can stick or pin up somewhere you will see them in the house – so doors and curtains are great for this just be careful not to damage anything!
The phrases will then get wedged into your mind and you’ll start thinking on them and mulling them over until a poem forms around them.
Music and the muse have always been intricately entwined, one thing that some of us here a WoPo find really useful is finding music mixes on youtube. This is also how we find new artists for album buying!
There is music for many different moods, some with images – just type the mood or inspiration words into the search part of the site. One of my personal favourites to search for is Epic, which is where the above mix came from, but you can get relaxing, inspiring, alpha wave and so much more.
Another way of syncing music with the muse to help with writing is to play a CD or digital music file in something with visualisation software, that is most laptops and gaming systems like the xbox. The music plays and the screen fills up with pulsing shreds of colour that react to the sounds.
These alone can inspire the writer. Basically put some music on, let it soak into you and then start writing. Just writing down your feelings and senses for as long as the album or video lasts!
Try not to stop and think, just write and write. There will be the bones of a poem in there somewhere.
Back at the beginning of the year we created a Pinterest board to help collect images and concepts we thought might help the aspiring poet – why not have a go at this yourself. The site is free and tries it’s best with copy right too 🙂
Set yourself up a board where you can collect images from within pinterest, or from the web or even add your own if you so wish!
Then grab your timer and write about each picture for 5 minutes.
Or alternatively create a mood board, where you collect images that are “dark” or “joyfull” or show the wonders of nature or the moon etc… Spend half an hour at a time scouring the sight for images for your mood board. Then leave it for a while and come back to the board, drink in the images and listen to some similarly mood orientated music and then begin to write.
A good example of a mood board is Deep Ice which was set up with novel writing in mind but works well for poetics.
Old maps can be a great source of inspiration, why not get an old map and write your poetry straight onto the pages. Where does the map represent? Do you have memories there?
If you are artistic why not draw a picture on the map and then see where that takes your imagination or just look at the picture above, set a timer for 5 minutes and just start writing.
There are some amazing pictures and concepts to be found on the site Pinterest, so we have set up a WoPo Inspired board which you can scroll through to find ideas or a mood or a feeling for your poetry.
Ripples and waves make up everything around us, the patterns repeated on different scales, again and again through nature but within these ways lurks the super waves, seemingly out of nowhere and yet there is a pattern there too.
Find an example of waves or ripples, then spend 10 minutes writing about them.
Imaging that you could change into anything that you wanted, from a squirrel to a snail, to a bear, to the Earth, star, universe, or maybe into love or life itself.
What would be your choice and why?
Spend 20 minutes writing on this. At the end look at what you have written, and begin to construct it into a poem.
The image library social media site Pinterest can be a gold mine for poets. Start a board collect images that inspire you, then spend five minutes with each picture examining it, it may invoke a mood with in you or remind you of something.
Set yourself a set amount of time each night to write from the images.
