Some of my poetry is considered surreal and dreamlike. I've even published some of my more bizarre dreamscape style poems. Some appear in the collection Nocturne, which is a night-inspired panorama of dream-state poetry. But some of those dream-like poems were not actually inspired by dreams. They were inspired by random sampling of sounds and images while I was very much awake and listening to conversations, or in the case below, watching a movie.
Here's a brief section of my poem Strange Things Happen When You're Dreaming:
The cracks form into crevices like canyons drawn with crayons. The scorched mud coalesces into quintessential islands. Down from the highlands bitter winds are blowing in their surges, as they whistle into sand filled ears that nothing ever purges. You run, but shadows follow you, descending and ascending ... they lengthen ... as the sun goes down you see the light is bending, and you fly so high, so very high o’er land without a sound to keep your fearful feet a-running over barren desert ground, and in the distance, you can hear a thousand voices screaming: and everyone will tell you strange things happen when you’re dreaming.
The technique works like this:
Method 11: Movie Sampling. Choose any movie you like. Play two or three simultaneously if you wish. Begin to write, and as you do, randomly listen to the dialogue or glance up at the sequences of images and try to capture them. You won't have much time, so do it quickly because the scene or dialogue will rapidly change. As with much of the text you generate with a random writing method, you'll get a lot of seemingly unintelligible sentences or phrases. It really doesn't matter. Leave it for a while, and then return to it. Read it to see what emerges. With the poem above, I scribbled down many random ideas from watching the movie in real time, and then returned days later to transform it into some form or rhythmic narrative, with the internal rhymes added.
Steve Wheeler
Images from Rawpixel used under a Creative Commons licence
Previous posts in this series:
Experimental Poetry 1: Found Poetry
Experimental Poetry 2: Stream of Consciousness
Experimental Poetry 3: Fake Translations
Experimental Poetry 4: Overlapping Voices
Experimental Poetry 5: Random Prompts
fascinating idea!!! can collage with movies attending to sound!! aaah how poet a tree branches!
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting exercise! I have used the random 'glance around the room' technique, but not randomly writing words down and returning to them later. I anxiously anticipate constructing something different from my 'norm'! Universal Peace & Love 🪷
ReplyDeleteIt is definitely a great way of assemnl9ng ideas for s different style of poetry. Good luck with it Karin.
DeleteI love this, works with tv sitcoms also! Excellent stuff experimental poetry.
ReplyDeleteYes, works with most entertainment genres and also news and current affairs programmes. Go for it, Invisible Pete.
DeleteI will give this a go
ReplyDeletePlease share the result here Martin. People would love to read best you come up with.
DeleteI’d love to know what movie you were watching when you wrote Strange Things Happen… It reads like you wrote it in CinemaScope. Yet another amazingly applicable lesson! Excited to see how all the Invisible Poets will interpret this one.
ReplyDeleteIt was a Spanish surrealist movie from 2022 called Bardo
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