Or become hysterical – but do go to Japan, it’s great.
Yesterday’s word adventure was to think up a concrete noun – a word for a solid, everyday thing – and look it up online.
Then, the idea is to replace that word with an abstract noun – love, fear, sorrow – and see what emerges: a ‘replacement poem’.
It’s a nice way of forcing an unusual perspective, a form of remote association (which poetry depends on) – wherein one has to draw together two disparate elements and seek what links them. I found the playlist poem exercise did this, too, linking song titles to a Russian constructivist tower (!).
So I got a concrete and abstract noun (from a third party, to make it interesting), looked up the concrete noun and found a news story about it, or a particular type of it…Then created a sort of deletion poem, cutting down and down until it became something else:
Hilarity Crash-Lands in Japan
It burst in
from a pit
that orbited Earth
for eight months.
Very interesting
flowers.
The ‘extraterrestrial’,
expected in April,
suddenly produced.
Form was unusual:
sent to the ISS
with astronaut
Koichi Wakata,
returned to Earth
eight months later.
“We are amazed
how fast it has grown,”
Masahiro Kajita,
chief priest, said.
Children planted the seeds,
to blossom in 10 tears*,
when children
come of age.
The original – very strange & beautiful – news story can be read here.
* NB this typo was in the original article, but I left it as I liked the image…