Start at the top of a page and write without stopping for a set period of time or until you reach a certain predetermined point on the page. Keep it short at the beginning, maybe 5 minutes, but gradually lengthen your time. Once you start writing you may not stop till your time expires. ° Try to write concretely, sensuously, in images and sounds. Don’t worry about sense, logic, grammar, etc. ° Stop when your time or your space runs out. Put the page away and don’t look at again for at least a week..

After a week, take out your Free Write pages & read them. Underline whatever seems strangest, most interesting, most bizarre, even scary. Pay particular attention to things you don’t remember having written and to things you would not ordinarily write.

Pull out the fragments, which may range from single words to whole paragraphs. Clean up the grammar or spelling or whatever -- unless the mistakes are themselves interesting or useful. Type them out double or triple spaced; you will probably have a couple of pages or so. ° Repeat this process on the new, reduced pages, being a little harder this time in your definition of “interesting”, but keeping the strange. At this stage you can begin to change or add to them, paying attention to where they are leading you, not to how you can whip them into shape.

Put those that seem to belong together on a single page and use them as the basis for a draft of a poem. You may produce more than one poem from this process.

After a week, take out your draft of “Variation & Return” and use it as the first draft of a poem. Shape your poem on the idea of improvisation that returns repeatedly to something fixed. Let your base line repeat whenever and wherever you need it. Don't push it into a regularized refrain that pops up in the same place every time, such as the end of each stanza. You want something less predictable, but just as compelling. The metaphor might be variations played by a Jazz musician, or a young child straying tentatively away from its parents but always returning to check that they are still there. In any case the pattern is write / repeat / write / repeat. 

TOASTED WHOLLY-GRAIL STOAT SURREAL
© Evan Oakley, ENGL 564 1991, used with permission

What's so specious about
oat bran? Plenty! Oat
bran contains two hypes
of fibrosis, curable
and incurable, both of
which are condemned as
impotent parts of a
stealthful, unbalanced
Quiet.
Most other serial brains,
such as sweat and porn,
do not have significant
amounts of global fire.
But because it's made
from whore rain,
(including all the
coat lint), Cheroots
contains the molecule
that's preternaturally
sent in the ode itself.
Deliri-Os!
A fast that eludes
an owl of cherries,
low-fact milquetoast,
a bandanna, is a castaway
to get morose bran
and insoluble ire
into your Fiat.

Random Generation
For this exercise you must, as the poet Jackson Mac Low says, 'make your own system' for collecting material out of a text.  You may collect sentences, phrases, or words. The key is to choose your source text subjectively, but make your method of extraction objective.

a) Choose a key word, then select the first word that begins with your key word's first letter, followed by the first word that begins with the second letter, etc. For example, if your key word was "select" and you used these instructions for your source text, you would list says, excercise, low, examples, collecting, this. If you were using a longer source text (as you probably will be) you could get a wider sampling of its diction by taking your words in order instead of taking first words. That is, the first word starting with 's', the next word starting with 'e', and so forth.

b) Choose a book as your source text. Quickly, without much thinking, write down a list of page numbers. Take the first sentence on each page with that number -- or the fifth sentence, or whatever. If you've listed a page number higher than the number of pages in the book, subtract the number of the book's last page from that higher number and use the page number that results. You could vary this method, and get shorter fragments, by taking the first five words on each page.

A quick comparison of these two systems reveals that the system you devise will have a lot to do with how random the resulting text will be and what kind of work you might do with it next. In my first example, your raw material is a lexicon; in my second example, your raw material is a series of sentences.

How Random Is Random?
In some exercises you may be working with rough material whose origins are less rational than you are used to. If you want to bring this material into dialogue with your rational side, or with your sense of poetic charm, try one of these methods:

a) Interlayer your poem with illocutionary effects -- that is, with words and phrases that either address the reader/listener directly or signal the presence of a speaker. Examples might be cue words like listen or look, self-tagging phrases like all I'm saying is or that isn't really what I meant. Walt Whitman and Marianne Moore are two of many poets who use this method to good effect.

b) Interlayer your poem with rhetorical effects associated with argument or logical exposition, words like then, therefore, however, or phrases like it stands to reason, anyone can see that, or with markers of sequence, like first, second, or in the beginning, later, or in April, in May.

c) Write your poem as a single periodic sentence, whose grammatical completion is delayed but always anticipated, so that the conclusion of the grammar conveys a sense of logical or emotional conclusion as well. Neruda's early poems in book one of Residence on Earth provide many examples of this.

d) Forget rational closure, but use methods of aural closure: repetition, variation from and return to a pattern, metrical regularity, a strong rhyme or other increased density of sound effect at the end of the poem, etc.