4 Ways to Accidentally Make Art This Summer

Who do I want to be this summer? Ada Limón, for a start. Mid-garden, mid-poem, mid-breakthrough, mid-snack. I want to be Georgia O’Keeffe, windows down, driving into the desert with nothing packed. I want to be Yoko Ono writing instructions for things that cannot be done. I want to be Richard Siken starting a painting to avoid writing a poem and accidentally finishing both.

What happens when you read this much poetry, I’ve discovered, is that it doesn’t stay in the reading. It leaks. It gets into your hands. It changes the scale of things. Suddenly you’re interviewing the mold on the bathroom ceiling for a profile piece.

And then you’re making things. Small things, strange things, things that have no brief and no explanation except: the poetry got in. These are those things:

I found a better way to read a poem, and it involves neither reading nor, technically, the poem itself:

1. Assign each letter of the alphabet a different colour.

2. Choose a poem.

3. Translate the poem into that colour system.

4. Keep spacing and line breaks unchanged.

5. Start noticing repeating patterns.

6. Notice dominant colours (common letters), repeating colour clusters (repeated words), and areas where the pattern becomes dense, broken, or irregular.

7. If poetry isn’t your thing, at least now you’ve accidentally made abstract art.