Uut Poetry

Uut Poetry

Uut (n.): the chance meeting of a galleon and a caribou on the dissecting table of America
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This site is an endless adventure in the poetry and poetics of surrealism. Read about the origin and trajectory of this adventure on the Manifesto page.
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Brooks Lampe teaches writing, literature, and philosophy, at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. The poetry on this site, unless otherwise stated, is his. The rights to all works belong to their respective authors. Images are used by permission or license. Banner art by Karen Constance. Opinions expressed herein are my own (or respective authors') and not the views of my employer.

what3words Project

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In projects like “Metaphor-a-minute” and “half and half,” language is the trigger for irrational thought. It is also the entire trick of microdreams. In a similar vein, this automatic writing exercise comes courtesy of a brilliant web/iOs location app called what3words. Go to the app and you’ll see instantaneously what the point is–and its great potential for generating word phrases that can be exploited heuristically.

Instructions:

  1. Go to the app and drop the pin wherever your heart pleases. If on your iPhone, you could use your current location for kicks. The corresponding three-word phrase is your poem’s title and seed text.
  2. Write automatically for a few minutes without interruption. The form should be either a short prose poem or a poem of about 10-25 lines.

Aspects of the phrase to consider before and during writing–

  • the context in which the three terms could be found–i.e., the context or situation the three words implies or suggests
  • the larger associational evocations of the phrase: “navy nasal” to me sounds like British imperialism, and thus I subconsciously began my poem with “mammal tusks,” because of something vagely postcolonian, Marlowian and jungle-ish. This “chronotope” or narrative context carried the poem’s first several lines, in fact.
  • the phrase as a syntactic unit with its distributive properties–i.e., what does the phrase say or imagine as as a phrase? This takes the arrangement of the words into consideration. Usually the terms will unfold sequentially in a relation of modification, such that the first term modifies or is predicated on the second, and the first and second words as a sub-unit together modify the third. So “lobby navy nasal” is a phrase describing a “nasal” that belongs to a “lobby navy.”
  • after you hit a lag, push through by thinking associationally about each term independently. Somehow I got “eagle’s perfume” by thinking about “nasal,” and I got “sawdust” when I thought about “navy,” thus my final sentence: “The eagle’s perfume is / a whisper of sawdust.”

Additionally, one could incorporate unique geolocational dimension of what3words by including the location associated with the three words. For instance, “lobby navy nasal” is a on a residential block near St. Alban’s Community Living Center on the outskirts of Queens, New York. I did not do anything with that in my poem, but I could have introduced old people/Queens associations as further fodder for my writing.

As always, submissions welcome. No image required for this one.

What3words poems here.

Notes

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  3. tristessa117 reblogged this from uutpoetry and added:
    This is a sweet prompt. I’m definitely going to give it a try
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