Making New Poems Out of the Old

A friend and poet talked about not liking her poems as she read through them. It spurred my energy on, so here is a list of things I came up with:

• Rewrite the poems beginning with the last line first, moving upward line by line.
• Cut poems down their middles, then reassemble different halves together.
• Go N+7 Oullipo-Style with them! http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/
• Send them to Governor Brownback. If he doesn't like them, it's a victory!
• Cut out "the" and replace "be" with other verbs.
• Make your poems into paper airplanes and let them fly off of Shunganunga Bluff.
• Write shadow poems from them. In other words, read a poem, put it away, meditate on the now, then attempt to rewrite. You will get new poems to look at!
• Call up any news station. When someone answers, begin reading your poem. If she or he say or don't say anything, hang up after you are done. then write whatever comes to mind in that moment.
• Take your middle school poems and insert new lines into them!
• Rewrite poems word-for-word going backwards, starting with the last word.
• Take your poems, flip the page around, hold it to a light to see through to the words in reverse. However, retype what you think you see going from left to right.
• Try taking the last part of one line away, then the first part of the next line away. Make a new line out of the first part/first line, last part/last line.