Personal Universe Word Deck

A personal universe word deck is a useful tool for writing poems when you don't know what to write. Like a deck of cards, a personal universe word deck operates on chance, and if we respond to those chances openly, we can generate new poems. Below are the instructions for making a deck.

Concrete Words: To help you develop images for your poems, we will construct a deck of words for each sense. Words that represent things that can be experienced with the senses are called “concrete words.” These words should name images to which you have a strong reaction. Some might be things you like, but others might be things that make you cringe or wince. Write down approximately 12 concrete words for each sense. For examples:          

                   sight: stones, oak trees, horses, ocean....

                   sound: wind, waves, singing, frogs croaking....

                   smell: kitchen, blossom, weeds, baby's skin....

                    touch: horse mane, stream bed sand, fur....

                    taste: garlic, pepper, walnuts, jalapeño....

Concrete words can be generated by asking the questions, "What do I like to see?  What interests me when I see it?  What gets my attention when I hear it? As long as you reaction to the concrete image in some way or another, it will probably be of use. Images don't have to all positive or negative, but they should draw a reaction from you.

 Action Verbs: The deck should also include 30 action verbs:

                    heed, shout, whisper, listen, overhear, eavesdrop....

                    see, look, glance, peep, stare, watch, sight-see....

                    taste, savor, spice, flavor....

                    touch, tickle, hit, graze, slam, bounce....

                    smell, perfume, stink, exhale, inhale....

 Adjectives: Three descriptive words. 

braided, brazen, rusted

Try to make sure that your descriptive words are more than variations on the nouns and verbs you listed for the first two groups. In other words, don't put "fiery" if you already have "fire."

Temporal Words: Four words that show time.

Wednesday, late October, midnight, summer

 Abstract Words: Finally the deck should include three abstract words, words that stand for ideas or emotions or states of being:

                    mercy, anarchy, fatigue

 Drafting a Poem

          Write each word on a small card so you have a deck of 100 word-cards. Spread the cards on a table—word-side up—and allow your eyes to glance over them. If a combination of words catches your interest, use those words in a line or verse. Be non-critical. Although the words “silence” and “distort” might not usually go together, “the distorted silence” might make an interesting auditory image in a poem.

          Use whatever linking words you need so the random words fall into standard syntax. Grammar will lend the randomly chosen words a kind of logic that can’t be denied although the overall images are surreal. Try for at least 12 lines.

           Suggested Techniques

·        Make one line an exclamation.

·        Use two questions.

·        Repeat a phrase three times. Invert the order of words if that helps.  

Our word deck takes significant fragments from our lives, and in our restructuring of those fragments, we often discover what is personally evocative. The poem need not be intelligible as with the following example:

Red Bridge, Garden of Necessity

Faithless skin, draw your lines thin and red.
Eyelids, root perspective to these sullen windows.

My misunderstandings are never enough for me.

In the burrow of the mind, constant weather offers
no chance to erode the corners off a bad idea.

Hallucinations are never enough for me.

Recognize unhealed wounds as adequate answers.
Fallacies survive, remembered perfectly on forged evidence.
Can amnesia temporally punish complicit enemies enough,
                                a thought no doubt ripe with drought?

No, clandestine trauma is never enough for me.

If I ignore siblings in alleys,
any medicine dissipates along with their identity.

If the double doesn’t resonate enough for me, then

the double becomes a fragment of the crime a judge will follow,
a fingerprint as constant as the grain woven into an oak.

Faith identifies no boundary with another for me.

Accomplices muscle into the doorway
before their names are known,

all because this sphere never shivers enough for me.

Watch the fissure rise in the garden, a graph of necessity.
Shadows are temporal solutions, silt offers no compromise.

Let my darlin’ infiltrate your shell. Your trauma is never enough for me.

If the buoy of point-of-view rings hollow in its somber design,
its rise up the scale measures my stumbling

though never loudly enough for my darlin’,

a reassuring note in the most abstract of arts,
a distraction from others as nearby as nails on a hand,