Clustering: Open Out Your Thoughts

This article is for: Beginner and Intermediate poets

Sometimes we need multiple tools to do the same job.

Elsewhere on The Poetry Place you’ll already find articles on methods for generating original and surprising ideas, such as freewriting and listing.

But now I want to add another one, because I think you can never have too many.

Some methods work better for some people than for others; and sometimes we want to change our method to get variety, or to tackle different issues.

So here’s an idea-creation technique makes the most of the visual and associative aspects of your brain, and allows you to expand an idea as wide as your page can take!

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Welcome to Clustering

Clustering is a visual way of finding and connecting ideas.

You’ve likely done clustering before, though you might not have called it that: it’s also called mind mapping, bubbling, spider diagramming, and probably some other things too.

Students are often taught it as a way of developing ideas for academic writing, so you may not have thought of it as a poetry tool, but there are particular things about clustering that make it super useful for poetry.

Clustering can:

Access thoughts and ideas that freewriting and listing can’t reach
Tap into your unconscious mind, where the most exciting ideas happen
Help you create surprising but satisfying jumps and leaps in your poetry.

How clustering works

The basic idea of creative clustering is pretty simple.

Put a topic or idea in the middle of a blank page. (I’m going to do the topic Smoke—because this morning I set an oven mitt on fire in our toaster oven, and filled the kitchen with tons of the stuff!!)

Look at the topic, and note whatever comes into your mind first as you think of it.

Write that new thought down, and connect it to the central topic with an arrow. (In my case, it’s the color gray.)

Then see what other idea (or ideas) come into your mind based on the one you’ve just written down.

Add the new idea one step further along the branch you’re making, and join it with an arrow.

Keep doing this for as long as your chain of ideas lasts. Don’t worry if you seem to wander “off topic”: that can actually lead to the best ideas.

When you get stuck on your first chain, go back to your central topic and start another, separate chain of ideas.

(In my case, the next thing I thought of was an old friend who smoked cigarettes he rolled himself.)

An individual note in a chain can be anything you like, such as:

Single words
Whole sentences
Concrete objects or people
Abstract ideas
Questions
Bits of talk.

And just as with freewriting, work as fast as you can, and don’t censor: write down everything, even if the ideas seem daft or nonsensical or wrong, so that you’re ready to receive anything your unconscious mind wants to give you.

A finished cluster might look like this:

Benefits of clustering

As you can see from my example, clustering allows your ideas literally to “expand” into new areas—new areas of the page, and new areas of thought.

In my case, my initial topic of Smoke led to a whole range of ideas:

Ways to describe smoke physically

A character (my smoker friend)
Childhood memories (of British Bonfire Night celebrations)
A social issue (legalization of cannabis)
Historical events (the gas used in World War One, and the poems written about it)
A couple of pressing family health issues that have a lot of emotional power for me.

If I come to write a poem about smoke, I now have a very much wider range of ideas to draw on:

I can start in any one of several places—maybe description, maybe childhood memories, maybe one of the current family health issues.
Whatever I choose to start with, I have several links I can bring in, if I want, to give my poem breadth and depth.

If I hadn’t done the cluster, I would probably never have made most of these connections.

Why is clustering so powerful?

It’s visual and spatial, so it taps into new parts of your mind

So often in poetry, we think in lines: lines of poetry, lines on the page, lines of words.

Even freewriting and listing, as liberating as they can be, are still constrained by this linear approach.

But linear thinking is only way our brains function! We also think associationally, connecting ideas in more random, unexpected ways.

Being visual and free to move all over the space of the page, clustering can capture a lot more of those non-linear thoughts, and so add richness to our ideas.

It’s not limited by the rules of grammar

Because clustering is based on fragments of language, there’s less pressure to make sentences, or indeed full sense. As I said, you can jot down single words, phrases that mean something only to you, fragments of speech—anything! And this can be very freeing.

The rules of grammar and syntax may be holding back your best ideas like a fence—even when you’re freewriting.

Clustering can take that fence down.

It helps you make leaps

Something that learning poets often find hard is introducing unexpected changes, or what I call “leaps,” in their poems.

We’re all pretty well trained in thinking and writing logically and straightforwardly—that’s what our culture usually expects us to do.

But many of the best poems have ideas, images, openings or endings, that have some really amazing surprise in them.

Logical thinking won’t help you to do that. But clustering can.

Every single time you draw an arrow from one idea to the next, you’ve created a “leap.” Some of those might be small, but some could be much bigger. And what if you take out a few links from one of your chains? Or jump from one chain to another?

In my Smoke cluster for example, how about if I dived straight from Smoke to the poison gas of World War One, leaving out how I got there?

Or how about if I wrote mainly about my worries regarding the legalization of cannabis in Maine, but then at the end leapt to my memories of hundreds of people reveling in fire and danger in my childhood Bonfire Nights?

Either of these leaps would likely add a useful surprise and depth to my poem.

A few times when you could use clustering

To generate initial ideas
To deepen an idea before you start (this is the main one I use it for)
To make comparisons (metaphors/similes)—just put the thing you want to compare at the center
To create unique word choices—put the word you’re trying to replace at the center, and see what other words seem connected to it.

Next Steps

The main Next Step is just to try out clustering a few times, and see how it works for you. Feel free to adapt the method however you see fit—make it your own!

However, here’s an exercise to help you exploit the associational potential of clustering

Pick any topic, and create a cluster on it. If you’re stuck for a topic, do this one: “Moon.”
Based on the first note on one branch of your cluster, create a line of poetry.
So for example, if your first note is “silver,” you might write a line that uses that word (“I have never loved the cold white of silver.”)
Go to the next note on that branch, and create another line based on it. It does not have to follow on from the previous line.
So if your next note was “Hanging,” you might write, “I swing off the hands of time, enjoying the view.”
Do this for every note on that branch.
Arrange some, or all, of these lines you’ve written into a stanza of poetry.
If there are surprising jumps, keep them in!
Use another branch of the cluster to make another stanza.
Repeat until you have three or four stanzas.

This should make a poem that contains leap after leap after leap—maybe too many, in fact. But nonetheless you will have practiced that skill, and hopefully you’ll feel more confident with it.