Prompts
“I open myself to chance in order to invite the unknown.”
—Charles Simic
This page will index writing prompts as they are created. Links below index prompts on the old Tumblr site.
Spontaneity and Automatism
Natural Surrealism: Go someplace you can sit quietly in nature and let your subconscious speak freely.
Metaphor a Minute: Pick a tweet from @Metaphorminute and use it as the first lines of a poem.
Clickbait: Write a poem with a clickbait-style title.
Chance Procedures and Constraints
Six Lines: a poem that is six-lines long
Aural Free Association: free-associate based on the sounds of words
Yoga: Invent a series of surrealist yoga poses
Computer Moth: write poems based on computer-generated moths
Tumblr Dashboard: Stimulate automatic writing by responding to art on your Tumblr feed
638 Personality Traits: Write a poem based on one of the personality traits from this list.
Anecdote of the Jar prompt: Describe the relationship between objects and the environment.
Love Letter: Impress your lover by writing a poem, “Everything I know about _____.“
Minimalist Instagram, and a variant, Half and Half: Arrange words and phrases pulled randomly from a text into a collage.
Automatic Listening: Listen to someone talking or reading on the radio, TV, etc, and write down what you hear, sorta.
Dada Siries: Dictate things into your phone and see what comes out.
Collaborative Writing Games
From 2015: A Year of Surrealist Writing Games:
Directions for Use (October game): Rewrite a set of directions, substitution words and phrases
Syllogisms (September game): Three players construct a syllogism, each player writing one of the premises or conclusion.
One Into Another (August game): A riddle-style game where the writer describes one thing in terms of another.
Question & Answer (July game): A variation of the Exquisite Corpse in which the first player writes a question and the second, without knowing the question, writes an answer, as so on.
Blind Dialogue (June game)
The Virtual Materialization of Collective Arbitrariness (May game)
The Dice Game (April game)
Exquisite Corpse Line Pairs (March game)
International Chainpoem (February game)
The Game of Refutation (January game)
Logopoetics
These prompts give specific step-by-step instructions and emphasize jumping quickly between areas of consciousness.)