Forgetercise

This is a writing exercise modified by an exercise from Ann Lauterbach. Thanks Ann.

Forget everything you know about poetry or poets or language (I can do this pretty quickly, quite often I walk into the photocopy room at work and spend 5 mins looking around for the coffee machine, it's next door to the photocopy room). Now try to remember an experience you had of reading or hearing language that fascinated and/or baffled you. Now write about the place or time where that happened, don't worry too much about the words themselves, concentrate on the scene. Make that into a poem somehow. At this point you can unforget everything you know and make an awesome poem out of it.