Language is a virus

 

Rimbaud 

 

Stuck for an idea? Need a randomly generated writing prompt. Want to do a collage but haven’t got time to do that fiddly business of cutting up texts. Give Language is a Virus a try. The poet Pam Thompson recommended it to me a few months ago and I’ve used it a lot since then. It’s great for those inspirational quotes on creativity too, such as:

‘I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary. A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses…‘ Rimbaud.

or

‘Never afterthink to “improve” or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind-tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!-now!-your way is your only way …‘ Kerouac

Once you’ve primed yourself with a few words of wisdom from some of the past masters (sadly more men than women but that’s the cannon for you) then try one of the writing games or exercises. I really like the Electronic Poetry Kit section, which has a selection of cut up words from writers ranging from Baudelaire to Poppy Z. Brite (in the 90s I think I fell in love with her vampire characters the way Victorian ladies fell for Mr. Rochester). Anyway, this section is a little more balanced in terms of gender and allows you to drag and drop words to make found poems using your chosen author’s words. I actually prefer to work on paper, writing the poems in my notebook with the words on screen in front of me as prompts. My favourite so far is Bukowski. I got Love is a Dog From Hell for Christmas and those poems were in my head while I was using the Bukowski page of the Electronic Poetry Kit. I’ve sent that poem out, so I can’t share it at the moment, but I will share some of the lines that were generated from looking at the sections on Baudelaire and Donna Tartt (another writer whose world I was immersed in in the 90s when fiction, rather than poetry, was my main interest). So, here are two snippets, the first from the Tartt word bank, the second from Baudelaire’s.

‘where we go barefoot and beautiful
to be skinned’

and

‘the withered hyacinths of your breasts’

I’m not sure that the poems these phrases come from are that strong, but the process of creating them was interesting. It definitely made me do some work, and I’m sure it will feed into other things I’m writing. This post has only just scratched the surface of what the site has to offer, so why not give it a go for yourself and see what you come up with? I’d love it if you posted your poems, or lines from them, in the comments box.
Happy writing!