averbal is more suitable than asemic. averbal writing. writing without verbal meaning.

Thanks for sharing your constraints with us. If anybody has others, we’d love to hear them, too.

I repeated this, the same locations, every day for 7 days, reading aloud from a scroll at each site what I’d written for that location on the previous days. I read this last week at a Fringe performance with accompanying photographs by Valerie Matthews Logan projected on a screen as I read. Takes 22 minutes to read. I’d like to do more with the multimedia dimension—taking the poem out of its textual frame… perhaps adding ambient sounds to the visuals.

I also wrote a poem—like the transit stop exercise you describe—this was one of CA Conrad’s Soma(tic) exercises. Nine stops on the Broad Street Subway. Sit in a center seat in center car. Observe carefully. Eat some dark chocolate. Close your eyes and make a subaural hum—so only you can hear. As soon as the train stops, open your eyes and write the first 9 words that come to mind. Repeat for 9 stops. Leave the subway, find a bench or grassy place to sit, take notes, lots of notes, for each set of 9 words. Then write a poem from the notes. As Conrad says—you have been under the earth, you have come out into light of day—the poem will be there!

This will be published in Apiary this fall.

I also do what I call ‘riffs on words.’ I write a list of words, free association, than circle a predetermined number of those words as they claim my attention—and for each one, write a prose poem stream of consciousness, keeping that word in mind the whole time but trying NOT to write directly about it—resisting that as much as possible, but not to the point of making it a hard and fast rule. Neat to see how they tend to link together.

I did notice that you can contact the authors via the bio page of the website for the project, http://www.imaginarytwentiethcentury.com/

Superb promotional copy!

if you want to post or enjoy visual poetry then pleas come to http://www.poetryvisualized.com. The largest site on the web dedicated to visual poetry. You can find hours of visualized poetry.

My best,

Tansel