CHILD

Step one: Obtain a new­ly born human baby.

Step two: Every morn­ing tell it it is mag­nif­i­cent. Every night tell it it is an abom­i­na­tion. Repeat this process every day until the child moves out of your house.

Step three: Pro­ceed with the usu­al child-things: love, uni­forms, etc.

Step four: The full sum of all things the child says to you in the last three days of your life is the poem.

STRANGERS

Step one: Go to a pedes­tri­an mall & fol­low a stranger for about an hour. Pay atten­tion to things, objects, espe­cial­ly ones in unusu­al juxtapositions.

Step two: Sit down in either a sun­ny or shady place & write at least 15 images that came to you dur­ing the hour. Do not build a nar­ra­tive about the per­son, nei­ther a “he went here, he went there,” nor a hypo­thet­i­cal con­struct of her life.

Step three: Turn those images into a poem of 20 lines.

Step four: Title the poem what you think the person’s name is, based on fol­low­ing them.

Step five: Become the per­son you were following.

NEW COUNTRY

Step one: Go some­where you’ve nev­er been before.

Step two: Become invisible.

Step three: Observe how the peo­ple act & inter­act. Observe the objects that are cru­cial to their inter­ac­tions. Imag­ine the peo­ple nev­er leave this place: they were born here & will give birth here.

Step four: Write about the cul­ture that devel­oped in this space. Pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the estab­lish­ment of the gov­ern­ment & the rebel­lions that occurred dur­ing the ear­ly years of the government.

Step five: Write about your job in this place. How did you get your job? How does it make you feel?

Step five: Revise the poem into a lyric poem.

Step six: The title of the poem is the name of this country.

REFORMATION

Step one: Break all of the bones in some­thing that has no bones. Prefer­ably some­thing that has noth­ing even close to bones, like a flash­light or a memory.

Step two: Reform all of the bones so that the thing works in an entire­ly new way.

Step three: Ask the rearranged thing what its expe­ri­ence as the new thing is like. Write down every­thing it says. This set of words are all the words you are allowed to use in the poem.

Step four: Write a poem that cat­a­logues all the pains you’ve ever experienced.

Step five: The title of the poem is the name of the new, reformed thing.

IMAGINATIONS

Step one: Imag­ine something.

Step two: Imag­ine it harder.

Step three: Imag­ine it so hard that it changes into some­thing else.

Step four: For­get what you were ini­tial­ly imagining.

Step five: Write six lines of four words each about the thing you’ve forgotten.

Step six: Cut out all the words that remind you of some­thing else.

Step sev­en: Title the poem the name of some­one you love.

TENTS

Step one: Walk to the high­est point in your state.

Step two: Build a shack there & live through the win­ter in this shack. Con­tin­ue to live there until all the world fes­ters into eco­nom­ic & envi­ron­men­tal ruin. Allow all the world to fes­ter into eco­nom­ic & envi­ron­men­tal ruin while you live in the shack.

Step three: Return to the ruins of your pre­vi­ous society.

Step four: Scrounge through the pock­ets of all the dead bod­ies whose des­ic­cat­ed car­cass­es lit­ter the streets & fields, retriev­ing any­thing with words writ­ten on it.

Step five: Arrange the things with words writ­ten on them into an epic poem.

Step six: You are the sen­tinel. You will have no work of your own, but every­thing you read will become part of the epic poem.

Step sev­en: Wan­der among the dead eter­nal­ly. The name of this epic poem is Tents.

Math­ias Svali­na is the author of one book of poet­ry, Destruc­tion Myth (Cleve­land Sta­te­U­ni­ver­si­ty Poet­ry Cen­ter), & one book of prose, I Am A Very Pro­duc­tive Entre­pre­neur (Mud Lus­cious Press). With Alisa Heiz­man & Zachary Schom­burg he co-edits Octo­pus Books.