Experimental Poetry 15: Quantum Elements

About 20 years ago, the artist and poet Valerie Laws created an installation called Quantum Sheep. A 'quantum' is an allowed or required amount. Laws painted words onto the backs of sheep and then watched as the flock naturally moved across the field grazing. As the sheep moved around, new poems were constantly created. You might say they were Haik-Ewes.

In reality, perfect poetry was rarely observed, but as you can see in the above image the experiment demonstrated how random movements of words could create primitive sentences and breaks in lines, and generate idiosyncratic meaning for all those who observed. Poetry is like that. It really doesn't matter too much what the author intended. The reader or observer will impute their own meaning from the text regardless. 

Now, I am not encouraging you to go out into a field with a spray can and vandalize a flock of sheep. But there are other parallel methods you can try.

Method 26: Quantum elements. You will need a little preparation for this. Create a list of 66 words, a mix of verbs (drift, fall, rise, breathe, etc), nouns (clouds, ocean, jewell, sun, etc), prepositions (over, under, through, around, below, etc), adjectives (beautiful, evil, strange, wise, etc), adverbs (loudly, slowly, tired, lonely, etc), connectives (but, and, also, with, because, etc) and definite articles (make sure you have plenty of these: 'the' and 'a' or 'an'). Assign each word a number. Now grab a couple of dice and throw them. If a one and a six come up, you have the option to use word number 16 or word number 7 (1+6), or indeed word number 61. Write each word down. Repeat the process until you have a semblance of a poem. 

If you use three dice, you have a choice of 666 words (oh no, the mark of the beast!), and if you use 4 dice the choice will of course be 6666, and so on... the more dice you use, the more madness you will generate!

Method 27: Random word search. Use the same two or three dice and select a random book from off the shelf. Throw the dice to find a page number in the book. Turn to it. The second throw (with two dice) will indicate the line number. The final throw (with two dice) will tell you the word in the line. Capture each word onto paper and watch as it builds a confection of words. With some rearrangement, you should be able to create a unique poem. 

Method 28: Quantum words. Use a similar word list, either using cut outs from a magazine or newspaper, or from your own list of written words. Put them all into a box or container, and then draw them out, one at a time - without looking. Rearrange them onto a surface and see what emerges. Potentially a more successful way of doing this is to have separate boxes for nouns, verbs, connectives etc. and draw one from each as you construct your avant garde poem.

The random variability of these methods and the vast store of words should provide you with endless possibilities to create unique poetry, and with a little massaging of the sequences, possibly even some beautiful, evocative lines. 

Steve Wheeler

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
Experimental Poetry 6: The Movie Method
Experimental Poetry 7: Unexpected End Rhymes
Experimental Poetry 8: Calligrams
Experimental Poetry 9: Anarchic Poetry
Experimental Poetry 10: Timed Writing
Experimental Poetry 11: Paraphrasing
Experimental Poetry 12: Deliberate Malapropism
Experimental Poetry 13: Breaking Structure
Experimental Poetry 14: Speak out Loud

Image from Valerie Laws Website