poems i stole

another writing experiment from my notes app

Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Library of Congress

I was not happy. It was always grey. I had three and a half jobs and our apartment was never quiet, not for one single second and I really needed to write because my thesis was due, but I couldn’t.

During this time, I developed an anxious habit of recording snippets of overheard conversations in my notes app whenever I was on the train or at the coffee shop, not writing, feeling blue. Initially I was doing this because I wanted to get better at writing dialogue, but at some point I started turning these collections of words into poems. I used to write poetry often—the first piece of mine that was ever published was a poem—but I felt like I’d lost that part of my brain, nothing felt white-hot or interesting like it had when I lived next to the ocean and almost always had on a bathing suit and drank too much tequila. I think these poems made from stolen snippets became a way for me to feel like I was writing something even though I wasn’t feeling remotely inspired. Here’s the first one.

Here’s another one, I am still so delighted by the drama of the mother line…

And two shorter, newer ones.

The sun did eventually come out in Brooklyn and then we moved to a new apartment where it’s almost always quiet and warm and I have a blue desk and I can sit in the park that is less than a block away when I need a change of scenery. I finished my thesis (lol) and life has rolled along, but this is still one of my favorite ways to “write” when I’m feeling stuck. Here are the rules if you want to try it:

1. Sit somewhere relatively busy: a park bench, a busy coffee shop where people are coming in and out, a museum bench, anywhere with lots of foot traffic.

2. Make a list of any phrases you hear that pique your interest. Try for fragments and phrases only, no compound sentences. More random words will give you more to play with later. And no consecutive phrases from one conversation. We want our ears open to as much as possible. It will look something like this:
   Help
   Kick off
   What was that?
   Thanks a bunch

   Two at the bar
   He said
   Accused her
   All the world
   Only guy

   You will never hear from me
   What I’m saying

3. Sit quietly and listen for at least five minutes, up to as long as you can do this without feeling creepy.

4. Leave this list alone for a few days. Come back to it when you’re sitting somewhere quiet. Choose the most interesting or random phrase, or the phrase you’d like to use to set the tone, as the title of your poem. Using the above list, I’d go with

   Accused

5. Then use your phrases to build your poem. You can rearrange the lines any way you like. You can add line breaks between your groups of phrases to create rhythm. You can add punctuation, especially if you remember the person saying the phrase a certain way. The only thing you cannot do is add words. If you really have to, you can make a line break between words, but try to treat each line as an immutable object, like those fridge magnets. So you could make something like this…

   Accused
   
   What I’m saying
   All the world
   Accused her

   
   Help?
   Thanks a bunch?
   You will never hear from me

6. And once the words are arranged in such a way that they sound like music or mean something to you or you’re tired of looking at them, you’re done! You’ve written a whole poem, probably even a couple of poems, without actually writing anything new at all. Any phrases/words you don’t use, you can save for later. I think it would be really fun to organize poems by place (i.e., collect phrases in a certain park over a period of time, then make a series of poems only using those) but I’m not that organized about it.

I’m sure I did not invent this (see fridge magnets) and I am clearly not a poet, but this gets me thinking about words, and I almost always feel like actually writing something after. And most of all, I’d love to know if you have any weird hacks for writing? Jeannine Ouellette has a lot of good ones like her “daily sensory incantation.” And I never think of myself as someone who particularly likes writing prompts (I prefer to be tricked into doing my tasks, like a circus animal) but I do like Mary G’s substack.

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Thanks for reading! If you’re in New York, I’m reading at Apartment 5 in the LES on Thursday. You can find more of my writing and interviews here. If you’d like to support my writing, you can order my first novel, Ghost Fish, here.