Increase Your Creativity: Found Poetry

Lucky people tend to be creative people. I think this is mainly because they tend to seek out unusual, creative ways to go about everything from their daily routine to handling huge personal issues. Regardless of how lucky or creative you normally are, there's always room to boost your creativity.

One of my favorite ways to kick-start my creative juices is to make or create something totally different than anything I would normally create. Here's an exercise I learned at a writers' conference a few years ago that's just plain fun.

Create Found Poetry

Found poetry is made up using words and phrases you find. On the surface that sounds sort of lame, because unless you're going to make up your own language, you "find" all the words you use.

Grab a book, newspaper, magazine--anything with printed words. The dictionary or a thesaurus will work, but it may be a bigger challenge than you'd like. Open your printed word medium of choice to any page, close your eyes, and place your finger on the page. Open your eyes and copy down the phrase you were pointing to. Include any punctuation that appears with the words.

Flip through the pages, or look at different areas of the page you started with, and hunt for words or phrases that might work well with your first phrase. Copy them down, and when you've "found" enough phrases to suit yourself, arrange them in the form of a poem. If you use more than one phrase per line, leave a good-sized space between the phrases.

Very old books and the classified section of newspapers are my favorite places to "find" poetry. Here's a poem I created from classified ads:

The Creator has A Name.
Are
You The Father?
Find the solution!
We deliver!
Beautiful baby
Help us find her.
Will keep clean
For life.
Cash buyer.
Will pick up.

As you can see, I am not a poet, am basically rhythm-impaired, and will never make a cent with my poetry. That's okay, that's not why I compose poetry, and this is one of the extremely rare times I'm brave enough to share what I've composed. After channeling my creativity into an unusual outlet like this, I feel recharged and better able to create something I do want to share.

Write a poem. Share it or don't. But please let me know if you enjoyed this exercise, and how effective it was at boosting your creativity.

Does Your Creativity Need a Boost?

Most of us can use a little help once in a while, and if you'd like to rev up your creative juices you may want to consider working with a creativity coach. This can be very expensive and for many struggling artists seems like an impossible dream. Eric Maisel, author of many books on creativity, teaches people to be creativity coaches and as part of their training his students work with clients for free. The next training begins June 16 and coaches-in-training will work, via email, with clients at no charge for the 16 weeks of the training. If you would like a little help with any art-related or creativity-related issue: blocks, procrastination, career issues, motivation issues, etc., just send him a paragraph about you and a paragraph about what you would like to work on with a creativity coach. Send that info to ericmaisel@hotmail.com. I've done this program with one of his students before and it was so helpful I'm thinking of doing it again!