Forums → Art, Music, and Writing → Poetry Help

@Yellowcat What kind of help are you looking for?

@Saphire24 Just any ideas for what to write

@yellowcat Well, since it's absurdist, you can write anything, can't you? Like donuts stuck to trees, and a funeral for stones, or pink giraffes flying south for the summer. Is that what you mean? Or are you looking for something more structured?

You might consider taking absurdism at face value, as a philosophical view about meaning, value and the human condition. Absurdist plays take on this idea as well, though they tend to focus on language and how it is inherently meaningless. I feel like saying silly things just to be silly sort of misses the point here. Since the poem needs to be 'about' something (i.e. it's about absurdism), there's an implicit recognition that language has meaning. So, again, just saying random things would miss the point here.

A key feature of absurdism in the recognition that life lacks any meaning but not succumbing to that thought. Albert Camus talks a lot about this. Suicide, he says, is just conceding the point that life lacks any meaning. Religion, on the other hand, is conferring meaning based on imagined sources. Rather, we seek individual, subjective meaning despite the full awareness that no such meaning actually 'exists'. That itself is an absurd idea.

With that in mind, you mind think about subjective or cultural values that are really important to people but not to an outsider.

As something off the top of my head:

Take your shoes off at the door because the movie is about to start

There, I'm just trying to connect two very disconnected cultural ideas (taking shoes off before entering a home and turning off a phone before a movie starts). They're connected in a temporal sense--they both are culturally required before something else. And they're connected in that, failing to do these things comes off as really rude in the relevant culture.

Both of these practices have relevant justification, but neither of these things are morally required in any obvious way. The values there, according to the absurdist, are entirely subjective and probably entirely contrived.

In short, there's a serious way to take absurdism. If you want to get the most out of this project, I'd suggest focusing on that path.