Welcome to Day 15: halfway through a glorious month of poetry! And to launch us into the fresh half, your prompt today is a type of poem: a scattered poem. This is a kind of "concrete poem" – a concrete poem means it uses layout as part of its meaning. A shape poem is one kind of concrete poem (writing your lines in the shape of a vase, a butterfly, etc); a scattered poem is another. Instead of writing your poem in neat sequential lines, you literally just scatter bits of poem all over the page. The easiest way to explain it is to show you, so here are two examples. (You can click on the pics to see full-size versions.)
This was a scattered poem from October 2019, when I was struggling to work while I had a massive head-cold, and the scattered format was the perfect way to describe my determined attempts at (very distracted) thought. It comes in little disjunctured runs which can be read in any order, with a very loose chronology, and arrows to connect a few bits.
This scattered poem was from the prompt "The language of broken things" and runs down the page in two columns, left and right, both combining in the final two lines. It also plays with two different kinds of text: the bold text scatters the letters of a phrase down the page, then the little capital letters play with the bold text to create another layer of meaning.
Explaining it like that makes the process sound a lot more planned-out and deliberate than it was, though. In reality, with both poems, I just wrote all over the place and added bits as I felt like it! Approach it like the cheerfully messy thing it is: just scribble bits anywhere you like and feel free to switch pen colour.
By their nature, scattered poems suggest some kind of overwhelm or chaos, so for an idea of what to write about, think of something that you find highly stimulating, even overstimulating. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing – just that it's a lot to take in! I'm HSP (highly sensitive) so I'm quite easily sensorily overwhelmed, even by things I delight in. My list would include sitting in the outdoors AMT coffee shop on Cornmarket while the buskers play and people stroll past, St Giles's Fair, any music festival, all kinds of outdoor markets. You could also write about things like having sex, falling in love, travelling in a specific new place and the disparate impressions, any kind of new experience, and so on.
The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.
