This is your brain on Buzzfeed

I’ve gotten really good at throwing myself into things.

So far it’s worked out pretty well for me. The reward is worth the risk. It’s the inbetween time, the waiting to hear back, that makes me question what the hell I’m doing.

I’m in the inbetween right now, having just completed what is undoubtedly one of the strangest poems I’ve done. Of course, it was a writing exercise for my visual poetry class. Constantly pushing me to places I would’ve never thought to go.

The assignment: compose a poem that can be read multiple different ways. This can be done on the internet if you’re good at HTML (I’m not) or pieces of paper in a bag will do.

I went the pieces of paper route, sans bag. I tore apart my room searching for this black, gold-embellished drawstring bag I thought I kept from a birthday present a while back. Along the way, I found an empty pill bottle that once held antibiotics I was on about a year ago. I’ve no idea why I kept the thing; maybe because I’m allergic to most antibiotics and I wanted to remember the type that didn’t make me break out in hives. Regardless, I thought yes, good and went about my wild way.

I wish I could accurately describe my thought process throughout the whole ordeal, but I can’t. It all just kind of happened as a result of an idea I had floating around in my head since the start of the quarter involving the distortion and exploitation of the already distorted and exploitative headlines of clickbait articles. In short, I took the first 3 words from every clickbait headline on the front page of Buzzfeed, typed them up, printed them, and cut them out. I then rolled each one into a small cylinder and put it in the bottle. At the end, I shook the bottle in hopes of shuffling the headlines, poured out a varying number of pills into my hand at a time, and made a poetic line out of whatever was in my hand and in the order I opened them.

The result, aside from paper scraps all over my floor and a strained neck, was:

My prof is gonna have a blast reading this one.

I’ve done Dada poetry in the past quite similar to this, where I cut up each word in a newspaper article and used the same process to make a poem out of it. With the clickbait headlines, I think this really emphasized their banality as well as their absurdity when viewed individually or together as a whole. (Fun fact: the most common clump amongst the headlines was “Are You More”.)

I wonder how my prof (or any other person who has this misfortune of being handed this strange package) will experience it. Will he pull them out one by one and read them? Will he pour a few in his hand at a time? Will he follow the directions on the label: take 3 pills throughout the day with a meal? Will he dump them all out at once?

That’s what I love about this assignment. A poem that can not only be read in many different ways, but can be approached from several different angles. It also terrifies me. What if there’s something I haven’t accounted for? What if my prof is so fortunate as to have little to no knowledge of clickbait articles and doesn’t get the joke?

What if. A customer came through my line at work today and, at the end of the transaction, handed me a small card that said “What if?” on one side with a paragraph of fine print “what if” questions on the other, most saying something to the effect of “What if you never repent for your sins and burn in Hell for eternity?”, or my personal favorite: “Every second, 2 people die; what if your second is now?”

I laughed. The ridiculousness of those “what if” questions illuminated the ridculousness of my own.

Dear self: abort “what if”, embrace “oh god what the fuck”. Buy property in the inbetween– get comfy.

What the hell is a poem?

My writing assignment for today was to compose 5 “micropoems”, each written on the blank side of its own respective 3×5 notecard. The purpose was to get a feel for Sentences, a series of poems by Robert Grenier. You can flip through them here, though I encourage you to research what the actual physical copies look like as well as soundbites of him reading the poems. Really fascinating stuff.

I wrote my own poems before having the luxury of a class discussion about Grenier’s work, so I took what I could from what I saw and tried to incorporate it in my own voice. Here’s what I came up with:

I had to glue them in my journal for class, but I think that individually they are more poignant than when shown pasted together. Although, admittedly, I wrote them all in one day and without a doubt they are all related simply by time and circumstance. Just try to imagine them alone, I guess, since I don’t have time to crop each picture with my present homework load.

Before I run off, I’d like to give a snippet of our class discussion today pertaining to the stubborn question what makes a poem a poem? I think everyone in the class was asking themselves the same question as they did this assignment. My prof claimed the key characteristics were complexity and resonance (though clearly defining ‘resonance’ required a classmate’s quick trip to dictionary.com).

Works for Grenier, apparently. Works for me, I hope.