3/30

Number 3--
I cannot imagine a day without music. And in this age of digital music, I can listen just about anytime, anywhere. But now that my music is on my iPod instead of CDs or vinyl, I find that I often don’t know the titles of the songs I am listening to, and I am often surprised by their evocative qualities when I take the time to read them.

This exercise will use your mp3 player’s innate ability to be random. So get out your iPod, your Zen, or open up the music files on your computer media player, and let’s get started. (This prompt was originally posted at the old Read Write Poem site - if you tried it there, give it another shot!)


Step One: Put your music on shuffle.

Step Two: Shuffle your songs forward five times, writing down each title that comes up. (If you have lots of classical music, you may want to shuffle within a playlist that contains more standards/popular music titles). If you don’t listen to any popular music, you can visit Billboard online and write down five titles from one of their Hot lists.

Step Three: Incorporate the titles as complete phrases into a poem draft. You may separate the words with punctuation or line breaks, but the phrases need to remain intact. Here is my first attempt


the titles
 

The Perfect Kiss

One of Us Must know

Over the Top

Keeper of my Heart

Effigy

the poem

at the end of those storybook romances

there is that moment of the perfect kiss

the whispered “as you wish”

and a fade to black

Where do we go from here

one of us must know

are we just soldiers

waiting for orders

to go over the top

and if all is fair in love and war

does any of this make a difference

perhaps you are not the keeper of my heart

maybe this is not love's eternal flame

this could all be a waking dream

or the beautiful view of an effigy

burning in the distance