Poetry Experiment: Substitution

When you can’t find the words or the words can’t find you; when you don’t want to write or writing doesn’t want you; when you know it is more than a spell of writer’s block…

Sometimes, writing exercises just aren’t enough to bring you back. They ask too much, don’t give enough. They tend to come with an expectation: the poet is willing rather than resistant.

So, what do you do when you can’t write poetry and writing exercises just produce more blank pages?

It is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot recently, and which I still have no definitive answer to. Yet my mind continues to ask it, so perhaps it would be premature and lazy to give up on searching for a way back.

In my search I’ve been reading Charles Bernstein’s 66 Writing Experiments and thought I’d share experiment 11 and the subsequent result of said experiment.

The Experiment

11. Substitution (2): "7 up or down." Take a poem or other, possibly well-known, text and substitute another word for every noun, adjective, adverb, and verb; determine the substitute word by looking up the index word in the dictionary and going 7 up or down, or one more, until you get a syntactically suitable replacement. (Cf.: Lee Ann Brown's "Pledge" or Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin, On the Pumice of Morons.)

The Results

Fragment created by using Denise Levertov’s poem ‘Living’

The fin whale in leaf mould and grapple

so green-eyed it seeps

dystrophic summertime.

The wind chimes blotted out, the leatherback

shoaling in the sump,

dystrophic daydream.

Fragment created by using Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mirror’

I amalgamate silverfish and evolution. I haver niveous precision.

Whatever I seduce I swamp imminently.

Thank you for reading.