Bernadette Mayer's Writing Experiments

• Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a

few ideas have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with a non- connotative word, like "so" etc.

• Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from a piece of writing: eliminate all adjectives from a poem of your own, or take out all words beginning with 's' in Shakespeare's sonnets.
• Rewrite someone else's writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.
• Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of

prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing work.

• Get a group of words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form

these words (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way. Design words.

• Eliminate material systematically from a piece of your own writing until

it is "ultimately" reduced, or, read or write it backwards, line by line or word by word. Read a novel backwards.

• Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another,

pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can. For example, use science terms to write about childhood or philosophic language to describe a shirt.

• Take an idea, anything that interests you, or an object, then spend a few days looking and noticing, perhaps making notes on what comes up about that idea, or, try to create a situation or surrounding where everything that happens is in relation.
• Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be

handled in space. Print them on large cards or bricks if necessary.

• Write as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to paper and don't stop. Experiment writing fast and writing slow.
• Attempt tape recorder work, that is, recording without a text, perhaps at specific times.
• Make notes on what happens or occurs to you for a limited amount of time, then make something of it in writing.
• Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you.
• Write in a strict form, or, transform prose into a poetic form.
• Write a poem that reflects another poem, as in a mirror.
• Read or write a story or myth, then put it aside and, trying to remember

it, write it five or ten times at intervals from memory. Or, make a work out of continuously saying, in a column or list, one sentence or line, over and over in different ways, until you get it "right."

• Make a pattern of repetitions.
• Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by

choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or rewriting the "source."

• Experiment with writing in every person and tense every day.
• Explore the possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries,

almanacs, etc. Consult the thesaurus where categories for the word "word" include: word as news, word as message, word as information, word as story, word as order or command, word as vocable, word as instruction, promise, vow, contract.

• Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index.
• The possibilities of synesthesia in relation to language and words: the

word and the letter as sensations, colors evoked by letters, sensations caused by the sound of a word as apart from its meaning, etc. And the effect of this phenomenon on you; for example, write in the water, on a moving vehicle.

• Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial.
• Consider word and letter as forms-the concretistic distortion of a text, a mutiplicity of o's or ea's, or a pleasing visual arrangement: "the mill pond of chill doubt."
• Do experiments with sensory memory: record all sense images that remain

from breakfast, study which senses engage you, escape you.

• Write, taking off from visual projections, whether mental or mechanical,

without thought to the word in the ordinary sense, no craft.

• Make writing experiments over a long period of time. For example, plan how much you will write for a particular work each day, perhaps one word or one page.
• Write on a piece of paper where something is already printed or written.
• Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing and vice

versa.

• Experiment with writing in a group, collaborative work: a group writing

individually off of each other's work over a long period of time in the same room; a group contributing to the same work, sentence by sentence or line by line; one writer being fed information and ideas while the other writes; writing, leaving instructions for another writer to fill in what you can't describe; compiling a book or work structured by your own language around the writings of others; or a group working and writing off of each other's dream writing.

• Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or

transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift.

• Structure a poem or prose writing according to city streets, miles, walks,

drives. For example: Take a fourteen-block walk, writing one line per block to create a sonnet; choose a city street familiar to you, walk it, make notes and use them to create a work; take a long walk with a group of writers, observe, make notes and create works, then compare them; take a long walk or drive-write one line or sentence per mile. Variations on this.

• The uses of journals. Keep a journal that is restricted to one set of

ideas, for instance, a food or dream journal, a journal that is only written in when it is raining, a journal of ideas about writing, a weather journal. Remember that journals do not have to involve "good" writing-they are to be made use of. Simple one-line entries like "No snow today" can be inspiring later. Have 3 or 4 journals going at once, each with a different purpose. Create a journal that is meant to be shared and commented on by another writer--leave half of each page blank for the comments of the other.

• Type out a Shakespeare sonnet or other poem you would like to learn

about/imitate double-spaced on a page. Rewrite it in between the lines.

• Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your

own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem.

• Choose a subject you would like to write "about." Then attempt to write a

piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone to grade you.

• Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses.
• Work with a number of objects, moving them around on a field or

surface-describe their shifting relationships, resonances, associations. Or, write a series of poems that have only to do with what you see in the place where you most often write. Or, write a poem in each room of your house or apartment. Experiment with doing this in the home you grew up in, if possible.

• Write a bestiary (a poem about real and mythical animals).
• Write five short expressions of the most adamant anger; make a work out of

them.

• Write a work gazing into a mirror without using the pronoun I.
• A shocking experiment: Rip pages out of books at random (I guess you could

xerox them) and study them as if they were a collection of poetic/literary material. Use this method on your old high school or college notebooks, if possible, then create an epistemological work based on the randomly chosen notebook pages.

• Meditate on a word, sound or list of ideas before beginning to write.
• Take a book of poetry you love and make a list, going through it poem by

poem, of the experiments, innovations, methods, intentions, etc. involved in the creation of the works in the book.

• Write what is secret. Then write what is shared. Experiment with writing

each in two different ways: veiled language, direct language.

• Write a soothing novel in twelve short paragraphs.
• Write a work that attempts to include the names of all the physical

contents of the terrestrial world that you know.

• Take a piece of prose writing and turn it into poetic lines. Then, without

remembering that you were planning to do this, make a poem of the first and last words of each line to see what happens. For instance, the lines (from Einstein)

• When at the reception
• Of sense-impressions, memory pictures
• Emerge this is not yet thinking
• And when. . .
• Would become:
• When reception
• Of pictures
• Emerge thinking
• And when
• And so on. Form the original prose, poetic lines, and first-and-last word

poem into three columns on a page. Study their relationships.

• If you have an answering machine, record all messages received for one

month, then turn them into a best-selling novella.

• Write a macaronic poem (making use of as many languages as you are

conversant with).

• Attempt to speak for a day only in questions; write only in questions.
• Attempt to become in a state where the mind is flooded with ideas; attempt

to keep as many thoughts in mind simultaneously as possible. Then write without looking at the page, typescript or computer screen (This is "called" invisible writing).

• Choose a period of time, perhaps five or nine months. Every day, write a

letter that will never be sent to a person who does or does not exist, or to a number of people who do or do not exist. Create a title for each letter and don't send them. Pile them up as a book.

• Etymological work. Experiment with investigating the etymologies of all

words that interest you, including your own name(s). Approaches to etymologies: Take a work you've already written, preferably something short, look up the etymological meanings of every word in that work including words like "the" and "a". Study the histories of the words used, then rewrite the work on the basis of the etymological information found out. Another approach: Build poems and writings form the etymological families based on the Indo-European language constructs, for instance, the BHEL family: bulge, bowl, belly, boulder, billow, ball, balloon; or the OINO family: one, alone, lonely, unique, unite, unison, union; not to speak of one of the GEN families: kin, king, kindergarten, genteel, gender, generous, genius, genital, gingerly, pregnant, cognate, renaissance, and innate!

• Write a brief bibliography of the science and philosophy texts that

interest you. Create a file of newspaper articles that seem to relate to the chances of writing poetry.

• Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them.
• Diagram a sentence in the old-fashioned way. If you don't know how, I'll

be happy to show you; if you do know how, try a really long sentence, for instance from Melville.

• Turn a list of the objects that have something to do with a person who has

died into a poem or poem form, in homage to that person.

• Write the same poem over and over again, in different forms, until you are

weary. Another experiment: Set yourself the task of writing for four hours at a time, perhaps once, twice or seven times a week. Don't stop until hunger and/or fatigue take over. At the very least, always set aside a four-hour period once a month in which to write. This is always possible and will result in one book of poems or prose writing for each year. Then we begin to know something.

• Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how

thought becomes language, or does not.

• Take a traditional text like the pledge of allegiance to the flag. For

every noun, replace it with one that is seventh or ninth down from the original one in the dictionary. For instance, the word "honesty" would be replaced by "honey dew melon." Investigate what happens; different dictionaries will produce different results.

• Attempt to write a poem or series of poems that will change the world.

Does everything written or dreamed of do this?

• Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other

poets' beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing for the "occasion" is part of our purpose as poets in being-this is our work in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others.

• Experiment with every traditional form, so as to know it.
• Write poems and proses in which you set yourself the task of using

particular words, chosen at random like the spelling exercises of children: intelligence, amazing, weigh, weight, camel, camel's, foresight, through, threw, never, now, snow, rein, rain. Make a story of that!

• Plan, structure, and write a long work. Consider what is the work now

needed by the culture to cure and exact even if by accident the great exorcism of its 1998 sort-of- seeming-not-being. What do we need? What is the poem of the future?

• What is communicable now? What more is communicable?
• Compose a list of familiar phrases, or phrases that have stayed in your

mind for a long time--from songs, from poems, from conversation:

• What's in a name? That which we call a rose
• By any other name would smell as sweet
• (Romeo and Juliet)
• A rose is a rose is a rose
• (Gertrude Stein)
• A raisin in the sun
• (Langston Hughes)
• The king was in the counting house
• Counting out his money. . .
• (Nursery rhyme)
• I sing the body electric. . .
• These United States. . .
• (Walt Whitman)
• A thing of beauty is a joy forever
• (Keats)
• (I summon up) remembrance of things past
• (WS)
• Ask not for whom the bell tolls
• It tolls for thee
• (Donne)
• Look homeward, Angel
• (Milton)
• For fools rush in where angels fear to tread
• (Pope)
• All's well that ends well
• (WS)
• I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
• (Allen Ginsberg)
• I think therefore I am
• (Descartes)
• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,. . .
• (Dickens)
• brave new world has such people in it
• (Shakespeare, The Tempest, later Huxley)
• Odi et amo (I hate and I love)
• (Catullus)
• Water water everywhere
• Nor any drop to drink
• (Coleridge)
• Curiouser and curiouser
• (Alice in Wonderland)
• Don't worry be happy. Here's a little song I wrote. . .
• Write the longest most beautiful sentence you can imagine-make it be a

whole page.

• Set yourself the task of writing in a way you've never written before, no

matter who you are.

• What is the value of autobiography?
• Attempt to write in a way that's never been written before.
• Invent a new form.
• Write a perfect poem.
• Write a work that intersperses love with landlords.
• In a poem, list what you know.
• Address the poem to the reader.
• Write household poems-about cooking, shopping, eating and sleeping.
• Write dream collabortations in the lune form.
• Write poems that only make use of the words included in Basic English.
• Attempt to write about jobs and how they affect the writing of poetry.
• Write while being read to from science texts, or, write while being read

to by one's lover from any text.

• Trade poems with others and do not consider them your own.
• Exercises in style: Write twenty-five or more different versions of one

event.

• Review the statement: "What is happening to me, allowing for lies and

exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems."