Whimsy, Connection & Exploration

a creative practice should be fun

OMG, i’ve used the should word. how dare I? dear me, you shouldn’t use “should.”

the main thing for me in my creative practice is that i have to find it fun. i’ve made this mistake many times in the past. i set up a constraint and try to follow it. it becomes dreary. i abandon it. so i need to have fun.

one of my most fun projects was a book-length poetry manuscript that has been rejected many times over. but it was so fun to write. It was called “Dame of the Dolphin.” i played with French-English cognates, words that sounded the same but had completely different meanings. I couldn’t get any of the work published, nor could I get any grants for it. Sometimes i find Can Lit a tad stodgy. sigh.

I used a variety of techniques and prompts. In particular I worked with OULIPO techniques. OULIPO stands for “ouvrage de littérature potentielle” and was begun by a group of whack-a-doo experimental writers in France in the 60s. You can google to find more info, or you can get a hold of a copy of the OULIPO COMPENDIUM, Edited by Harry Mathews & Alastair Brotchie. The book contains “an alphabetical listing of processes, definitions and personalities associated with OULIPO…”

Image description: book cover - TEXT: OULIPO COMPENDIUM/edited by Harry Mathews & Alastair Brotchie. IMAGE: a scattering of books on oulipo, a naked man overlaid with another man, his eyes covered with a black rectangular square. Four vertical white drawings of a man, a birdhouse on a boat, a fingerprint or possibly a cave, and a 3-d rendering of the number 6.

One of my favourite exercises from OULIPO is N+7, in which you take an existing work and go to your favourite dictionary. From there you substitute a noun seven words down from the original word in the source text and you make a poem or piece of prose or whatever you like out of it.

This does a lot of things creatively. It gets you out of your rut of programmed generic status quo thinking, and it creates interesting juxtapositions, making new possibilities for interesting images and ideas. I love any kind of constraint or tool that does this. I am so stuck in cliches and fixed expressions, it drives me bats.

There are days where I just get so bored with order in narrative and in a sentence. I need to play. I love playing. It’s the reason I bother writing poetry at all.

Here’s a little excerpt from the completely unpublishable “Dame of the Dolphin”

mourning trix

we believed she dead
Daphne, la dame du Dauphin
the dame of the dolphin
we saw her in her coffin laughing
wasn't that enough
she played it gruff
voiceless affricates so dry
we drank rye
high all thru the night
what is there to ponder 
out in the grate, beyond her
a hand, one finger curled
its come hither beckon, we reckoned
so we followed where
the digit led 
& fell
from  hill & dell
into hell, our version of
not white but red the doves
screeched clawing the ragged trees above
the bark bled blather from blitherers
bland boors in life too dull to be devils
more custard than bastard hoisted by
their own milquetoast petarde
dragooned, no dragons but dragging us
beyond the gravy of our sated selves
past the shelves of tombs banned
by pedants & pissants pisenlit peasants
who gathered lions' teeth
one eyed jackanapes so easily beguiled
were we in mourning our grey suits crisp with regret

Clearly I can never make a living as a poet. But perhaps you like what I do and wish to support my oddnik creative spirit in some way? I’d be ever so delighted if you became a paid subscriber. Most of my sporadic posts are free, but I have a plan to offer some special items to paid subscribers, such as an excerpt from my erotic novel, Tea, Kink and Flowers, or a healthy recipe for spicy layered eggs, or some other whimsical item not yet available to the general public. Thank you to those who have supported my efforts via a paid or free subscription or by buying me a coffee.