“I realized that subject matter is not something to worry about. Our concerns and obsessions will surface no matter what we do.”

“If we don’t have to worry about subject matter, we are free to concentrate on form.”

“…that any constraint stretches the imagination.”

-Rosemarie Waldrop

 

Introduction time again! I want to have a few things running around the site so that I can dabble where I like and post a variety of things. I know that most of my stuff that I am posting is very very short, but that’s mostly because I am gearing up to turn my thesis into a novel and 80,000 words is a huge task so having little things that I can churn out and get feedback on is lovely.

So welcome to Playlists.

I have an obsession with music and collecting music from my friends and making playlists that I can listen to when working with specific characters. I have a ton of them leftover from my Harry Potter fanfiction days and they are awesome mixes. But I also have some mood mixes, most specifically: Depressed, Angry, Dark, and one I made for my sister. I took a collage class during my grad program with a completely awesome guy and we talked a lot about using other people’s work to create your own. How sometimes when the words aren’t coming to you, you can reach out and take other people’s words and make something new and relevant.

As a project for this class I took four of my playlists and started pulling lyrics and making minimally structured poems with them as follows:

Playlist 1 – the first line of every song in the playlist

Playlist 2 – the last line of every song in the playlist

Playlist 3 – using the poem created from Playlist 1 I scrambled everything to make short prose poems

Playlist 4 – using the poem created from Playlist 2 I scrambled everything to make short prose poems

Playlist 5 – I took the first line of the first song, the second line of the second song, and so on and so forth through the playlist

Playlist 6 – I did the same thing as Playlist 5 but from the bottom to the top instead

Playlist 7 – using the poem created from Playlist 5 I scrambled everything to make short prose poems

Playlist 8 – using the poem created from Playlist 6 I scrambled everything to make short prose poems

Playlist 9 – Stream of consciousness type writing done while listening to each song on the playlist.

I am going to start posting these playlists soon, and if you like them, please check out Making Text to start playing around with collage and form yourself!

makingtext.tumblr.com

Please enjoy!

Michelle