Over the years, I often hear my music students talk about waiting for inspiration when they are learning to compose. Perhaps they didn’t write anything because they weren’t feeling particularly inspired that week. I can relate. When I was first getting seriously into composing in high school in the early 90s I would go through short periods of intense writing when I was struck by it, or dry spells where I spent my time reading and practicing instruments, waiting for that next burst of inspiration to hit me so I could compose another section or a new piece.

When I got to college, as a Music Theory & Composition major, I had weekly hour-long composition lessons with my professor, Dr. Yehuda Yannay (and later, others as well.) All of a sudden I was in a position where I was expected to bring something in every week. Being forced to compose music regardless of inspiration was game-changing for me. I realized rather quickly that part of the reason for musical writer’s block was simply being confronted by every and all possibilities. WHERE DO I START?!

The idea of constraints and process-based writing really helped. I would start with an arbitrary series of numbers, or some sort of mathematical idea and let that process play out, somehow translating it into musical material. I won’t go into details here, because this is simply my introduction into how I sometimes approach writing now, decades later, as a poet.

I’ve found that giving myself some big constraints or some sort of process to play out linguistically can lead to new and interesting ideas. Does it always produce my new best poem? No, definitely not. But, it sometimes leads to pretty neat material or opens avenues to explore that I hadn’t thought of before. This isn’t anything new. Writers and composers have been doing this for centuries. You can find examples of it nestled inside the violin lines in Mozart’s operas, Bach’s minuets, Medieval and Renaissance music, etc.

I was asked to write a piece this past year that I would read to open a performance by several musicians playing semi-improvised music based on the theme & vibe of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There was a technique I had been exploring a bit, and this was the first time I really put it into practice for a full poem. The performance ended up quite fun, and I worked in some vocal sounds and things as the piece unfolded as well.

The idea I used was to take Shelley’s 1818 text of Frankenstein, and pick 1-4 continuous words from the first line of each page, continuing through the initial lines of each page in the book this way until I had what I felt like was a complete poem. For example, (note: the boldface is my own for illustrative purposes later) the first line of the preface is, “The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed. . .” The initial line of the following page, the beginning of “LETTER I,” is “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster. . .” The next page begins, “of a part of the world never before visited. . .” etc.

The poem I ended up with is as follows:

Army of Frankensteins

by Jay Mollerskov

The event you will never have passed
necessary among how the time passes
reality more inexorable in haste
so strange an accident
the morning fearing his suffering
the ice continually a celestial spirit
listen to the mean street
tenderly to so little so quickly
as the principles of my own inexperience
of any modern age

Cheerfully to death of all my friends
to my solitary scene
and almost unlimited powers
promising me this day
no visit of a spirit

Rather to my speed and staircase
man allowed a dreary night
my mind become a hell nothing could equal
the bottom could not be felt or remarked
she died but more pain had only been delayed
in imitation of my return

We the assassin bade
prophesied more hideous a being
enter my mistaken joy

Sad hours round a league
lived a night unmingled on
your innocence of this world
as if I could die in peace

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I was surprised how well this poem felt like it captured the feel of the story of Frankenstein while avoiding telling any specific story at all. I’ve used this technique again with other books and it usually succeeds in producing a similar effect, which varies depending on the base text used. In performance I added some bits of “sound poetry” and vocal effects that seemed to fit the performance as well. Here is a recording of the performance of “Army of Frankensteins” on 10/18/25 at the Jazz Gallery in Milwaukee, WI:

christine barclay: mellotron, gregory daniel brown: bongos, michael firman: shakuhachi, wilhelm matthies: washboard, jay mollerskov: vocals & electronics, rick ollman: cornet & shaker, kelly popko: badhran, tim ross: bass, dave rothenmaier: drums, anja (notanja) sieger: shadow puppets, nick verbos: pogo cello

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This past Friday, while I was Writing-In-Residence at Vintage & Modern Books in Racine, I tried this generative technique again several times with various books. The first was a Sartre philosophical text, suggested by the owner upon my request for a random text to use. I won’t reproduce the resultant poem here because I found that the end result really felt like a mish-mash of philosophy text without any real meaning. My wife described it, “like asking ChatGPT to write Sartre.” So, I suppose the technique itself still worked. It just wasn’t a great source text to start with for something like this.

The next book I tried was kind of a joke when I pulled it off the shelf, but it actually worked pretty well! I grabbed “RV Vacations for Dummies.” Here is the resultant poem, using 1-4 words from the first line of each page:

RV Vacations for Dummies

by Jay Mollerskov

How far/how long
and country ham
looking for a close encounter.
Lion caves of the 1920s
never are electric
no matter the machine.

Different wrinkles to maps
a great need, a supply
the times, the latest
private need of
each committee models
sleep to maintain
restriction and those
that offer above the
old-fashioned.

It’s your need and fuel,
a great intersection
to be in the mind,
and want, and time in
a very cold climate

And regardless dissolves
our favorite things about being.
For we have such
and each side with
need of this variation
to the middle deep breath.

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That one was interesting to me because the source text was of an instructional nature rather than telling a story to begin with, so it is tough to compare the feel of the resultant poem. Nonetheless, I was pretty happy with the result! I did a couple more of these with other books that day as well.

This is just one example of a technique I use to come up with material. So others aren’t as dependent on using specific words from other sources, not that I have a problem with doing that. Artists have been borrowing from one another since the prehistory of art. The point here is that none of us need to sit around waiting for inspiration. Apply a few random constraints, come up with some sort of process, and it often is enough creative lubrication to get into a flow state pretty quickly.

I’ll try to share some poems by other writers I admire that are process based next time. In the meantime, if any of you have particular processes or constraints you like to use to begin writing, I’d enjoy hearing about it in the comments. Have a wonderful week!

Jay Mollerskov, ArtRoot Writer-in-Residence