x
x
Yes
x
x

I crawled into her eye. What did I find?
Possibly corpses, possibly the grave
for if you do not find me, Lucasia, I shall go out of my mind
indifferent to the cosmic microwave
clatters and shatters beside the autoclave.
Tear up You didn't understand; reformat
the shards of lab glass strewn across the doormat
upon which, desolate, the laureate lay
upon a white divan with Chardonnay
overnight caller, look the other way
the sidewalk heaves and cracks above the root
around in sunlight, looking for the dark?
The hooting sirens suddenly go mute
with all the hallmarks of that jeune Jeanne d'Arc.
(To each his own -- except perhaps for John)
He who, in Patmos, passed away in peace?
He smokes and somehow tries to carry on.
So here we are, mucking about in grease.

I quite like this one.

Jim: for "Tear up You didn't understand; reformat" I used a cut up generator of Matt's poem in your thread "Twisted." Thought we could get really meta with it.

Andrew, Ha! Yes, it occurs to me that there is a strong connection between the poetry that Exquisite Corpse produces and what found poetry achieves.

I like this exquisite corpse. It makes sense.

''mucking about'' sums it up nicely.

OK, OK,... I'll butt out... I'm not participating so I'm really not entitled to an opinion, except that I can't help but express the opinion that this poem is nonsense.

Right, I promise I won't interfere again; I'll leave you all to your fun...:p :D ;)

Jayne

Hi Jayne,

I think the value of a game like this isn't the poem it produces as a poem, though I do think this has love good moments in it (by definition accidentally created), but instead the surprising connections it makes help stir your own creativity.

There are whole poems that can come out of:

reformat
the shards of lab glass strewn across the doormat

or

desolate, the laureate lay
upon a white divan with Chardonnay

or, with some changed puncutation

To each his own -- except perhaps for John.
He who, in Patmos, passed away in peace?
He smokes and somehow tries to carry on.
So here we are, mucking about in grease.

If you think the game is to create a wonderful poem, you are of course going to be disappointed in the product. If you think about the game as an image or idea generator...well, I think you might find something redeeming.

Hi Andrew,

Yes, I take your point... and I hope everyone realises that my comment above was made in fun, honestly!

The idea just doesn't float my boat, that's all. I could more easily understand a composite poem that gets written line by line in the same way as this, but visibly, so that a genuinely good poem might possibly emerge, as a group effort.

The randomness of these lines just takes me back to the time when a bunch of us in a writers' group entered the International Library of Poetry competition, or something like that... oh, maybe twenty years ago or more. We each threw in a line from one of our poems and submitted it to this vanity publishing outfit, just to see what they'd say. The assembled poem was gibberish, of course, but lo! and behold! we were a "finalist".

The finished Exquisite Corpse poem reminds me too much of the above, I'm afraid!

But as I said, I'll keep schtum about it from now on, cross my heart! :D

Jayne

I was just sitting here with a quivering lower lip, sadly contemplating a plate of pissed-on chips when I realised that I am guilty, too.

Jayne, did you feel this discombobulated when I rang today and interrupted your games with the U3A to ask you to wave your wand over Jerusalem for me?

If so, I am truly sorry.

And just to prove how bad a person I am, I confess to playing a game like this with innocent primary school children in a classroom situation. We have cards, red ones with a single-syllable adjective, green ones and blue ones with single-syllable nouns (the blue being particularly easy-to-rhyme) and yellow ones with a two-syllable noun. They are many and random. Each child has a fistful.

Then we sing a song (to a tune from Oklahoma) -

You're as red as a green in a yellow
You're as red as a green in a blue
You're as red as a green in a yellow
And the last line is all down to YOU

Then I start picking on children and they start reading out cards of the right colour. We get stupid things:

You're as soft as a pig in a wardrobe
You're as brown as an ape in a tree
You're as warm as a heart in a handbag
(and then after lots of silly laughing, someone will do a line like...
And the last one's a nice thing to be.

Then they start looking at their cards and there's a lot of "Miss, Miss, Miss!" when they see they have one that's really good in the growing quatrain.

"Can we do another one, Miss?"

And then, if I've "played my cards right", someone will feel dissatisfied with an end result.

"In a carpet is silly, Miss - can we say on a carpet?"

"It would be really funny if it was a bee instead of a cork, Miss."

"Could we do the lines differently, Miss, because I've got a really good rhyme for muffin?"

"Can we cheat, Miss?"

And I tell them that poets cheat all the time and we call it editing - and then off they go, clipping and polishing and flying off at glorious tangents. I often go home at the end of a visit with armfuls of flipchart sheets and type and print and laminate all this wondrousness for them.

Am I really doing irreparable damage to their exquisite little corpses?
.

Annie,...discombobulated??? Me??? Why, no, not in the least, my dear friend, and I'm truly sorry too, if I gave you that impression!

It was very noisy in my house (with laughter, I must add) with twenty people playing board games, and I've only just realised that I was looking at the wrong thread earlier (not the Jerusalem one - Duh!) so I've put the deadline date in the right one just now.

All is well, (and shhh..., I'm not supposed to be posting on this thread any more - I promised! ;))

Jayne

What Jayne said. And what Ann said about it being a great exercise for primary school children.