Fast rhymes for fast times

Creativity under time constraint

This Saturday at the art gallery where I work we are having a “creativity under time constraints” event, where registered artists have eight hours to create a response to an exhibition/inspiration. We call it 8 To Create, and it’s the second time we’ve done this big experiment. As they occur I am reminded how much I enjoy coming up with (and executing) ideas in short time frames. See me and my friend David’s pop up poetry initiative below:

As a child I used to participate in this creative program called “Odyssey of the Mind.” A big part of this challenge was about a group of seven kids solving a massive problem within several months where you and your teammates had to make things work and put on a play for an audience and judges. Personally my favorite thing was the other part on the day of the competition called “Spontaneous” where you had to sit in the circle with other kids and be challenged in the moment to come up with multiple responses to a random prompt. I remember I won an award for doing spontaneous so well one year. Truly I felt like queen of O.M.ers for an afternoon when they called me down from the bleachers to receive my recognition.

Our 3rd grade team was called “The Radical Robots.”

Here’s a better picture of the whole team.

Incidentally I have guests visiting this evening, so I don’t have much time to do a Substack. Instead I went back through some Instagram story poems I’ve written over the years and found the ones I love the most. Instagram stories only give you 24 hours (max) to share or respond and then they disappear forever (more or less).

Occasionally in my stories I ask people to give me a topic to write a poem about. I usually do about 10-20 poems per session, and I highlight my favorites over the year, so that followers can review them past their 24 hour expiration date. (The poems below are the highlights of the highlights.)

Similarly, for years my friend David and I used to do “D ‘n A’s Pop Up Poetry” event, typing poems in rapid fire on typewriters. We would show up on the street, at galleries or festivals. People would give us a topic to write about and a gold coin donation, and we would respond to them in 15 minutes or less. First I would draft the poem on paper, and then I would type it up. It was a spontaneous and fun time in my life. I believe David has scanned somewhere all the poems we wrote, so maybe next time I have guests I will share some of those.

Anyway, that’s certainly a long enough intro. My poems are below. They aren’t masterpieces, but they were fun to dream up. I like them enough to revisit them here. Let me know if you have a favorite from my hastily written Instagram indulgences, and if you’d like me to write you a fast poem for another Substack, well, I’d love to do so!

I believe I intentionally spelled “seems” that way.