Prompts and Exercises
They create boundaries and frames to organize and channel creative energy.
A generated still from ongoing generative video project.
Enlivening Language
A story has characteristics like people, objects, atmospheres, and locations. Different stories have different people, objects, atmospheres, etc. When we deconstruct an existing story into different world-building elements - we can reuse the language and create a new world.
I started building a tool that makes it easy to create stories from worlds -
http://ex-worlding.herokuapp.com/.
World-Building T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, was inspired by Grail legends and passion plays. These legends and traditions are about how to keep aspects of culture fresh and alive.
I work with this technique to enliven my favorite poems. Here is an example Section 5 of The Waste Land rebuilt.
Wasted in the land
Coriolanus met Damyata
a woman among cicadas
a bat among spiders
higher than a cock
Hieronymo swallows
a spring hermit-thrush
hidden in the pine forest
beyond the endless plains
across the arid plains
beyond the desert sea
I crossed London Bridge
once the endless swallows
the spring plains
the hidden sea
Jersusalem a prison
a woman there among cicadas
the palace bats lighting
rain
rain
rain
first the nimbus cloud
second the frost
third the drought
then the moonlight
violet air brushes the carious teeth
te violet wind
the violet light
torchlight
dead mountain sand road
a woman sits with cidadas and bats
outside her mudcracked house
beneath her dry grass
wandering the white road
her brown mantle towers against
the blackened wall near empty cisterns
bells wells
chapel doors
windows close
oars seal empty rooms
keys coat the frosty silence
they sit in
stony places
agony
reverberate in prisons
reverberate in moutains
O sweaty solitude
sing to me maternal lamentation
before nightfall
in brown mantle
the empty cistern flash
silence cicadas
before a woman
unreal
Language Reuse
I think about rhyme and meter and homeric epithatics - and these were structures that allowed poets to recombine language but still tell the same core story. Here we tell a new story but with the old language.
Next Up: Song of Myself