poetry and process – creative writing experiment

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This poem was written in response to a creative writing exercise demonstrated in Hazel Smith’s The Writing Experiment : Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing (2005). As part of current studies, I have experimented with word pools, word association, word clusters and other language based techniques for free writing.

I began with a word randomiser that churned out 12 – 15 unrelated nouns or adjectives. After experimenting with this list, I created a phrase for further word play using rhyme or assonance, similar or contrasting associations and wrote a randomised ‘poem’ with these snippets.

Playing with phrases “an explosion of bronze”

• a bronze explosion
• a bronze compulsion
• a compulsion of bronzed bodies
• a body of compulsive tanners
• tanning the body bronzed beauty
• copper coloured curves
• exploding curves of colour
• fireworked copper and bronze
• sparks of fire colouring bodies
• reflections of bronze on our faces
• upturned to fireworks
• sparks on the skin
• colouring copper and bronze
• gold and silver
• stars upon stars upon stars in the sky
• over copper faces bronzed bodies

I subtitled this ‘summer carnival’, but it didn’t yet hang together with the mental picture I’d imagined of a summer evening festival, with fireworks going off over a crowded beach. I tweaked a little more, finding extra ideas to lay alongside the metallic themes for a more organic description. Finally, the poem reached the finished version above.