Posts on oulipo

Last week, a reader commented that poetry prompts can be gimmicky. True, but sometimes they’re also great creative un-stickers—not to mention fun! Here’s a Poetry Friday post of prompted poems.

At The Miss Rumphius Effect this week, the Poetry Stretch was to write a poem in “diminishing” or “nested” rhyme. Each rhyming word is contained within the previous one. Here’s mine:
 

Lunatic’s Lullaby

Hush, little child, do not be afraid;
the fabric of sanity ever was frayed.
Surrender your sense when the hobgoblins raid,
for no one but madmen will come to your aid.
 

Following last week’s lipogram, Jennifer Knoblock threw down the gauntlet, challenging me (and anyone else foolish/brave enough to try) to write a poem using letters that get high points in Scrabble. We decided success would be measured by taking the ratio of Scrabble points to the number of letters. (Yes, it's admittedly silly.) Here’s my dubious contribution:
 

Limerickqxz

A foxy young doxy blew sax.
With hip-hop, she hardly was lax.
But when she played jazz,
her lip work lacked pizzazz;
then nightclubs would give her the ax.
 

And here’s how I figured the score (Scrabble points/letters):

A (1/1) foxy (17/4) young (9/5) doxy (15/4) blew (9/4) sax (10/3).
With (10/4) hip-hop (16/6), she (6/3) hardly (13/6) was (6/3) lax (10/3).
But (5/3) when (10/4) she (6/3) played (12/6) jazz (29/4),
her (6/3) lip (5/3) work (11/4) lacked (13/6) pizzazz (45/7);
then (7/4) nightclubs (18/10) would (9/5) give (8/4) her (6/3) the (6/3) ax (9/2).

327 points divided by 120 letters = 2.725

I'll be getting a MacArthur genius grant any day now... And yes, saxophones are VERY POPULAR instruments in hip-hop culture! How dare you suggest otherwise?

I am, of course, reminded of this wonderful Threadless shirt, "Well, This Just Really Sucks..."

ETA: Jim Danielson has blown away my Scrabble score with a whopping 2.8194 point/letter average! Way to go, Jim!
 

This week’s Poetry Friday round-up is hosted by Wild Rose Reader!

_dent_ty Theft

Love seemed a dream, a warm well of contentment.
She gave herself up to the arms of another
and packed her own dreams far away, sans resentment,
unaware that the sweetest embrace can yet smother.

For she was no doormat! No, merely enchanted.
Bound up by love’s feathery arms, she could fly.
Slowly her own lofty goals were supplanted.
She never asked how; she forgot to ask why.

She never gazed up at the stars to remember;
her eyes shut, she rode a warm current to sea.
She slept, and her soul wasted to a dull ember,
a kernel of self that no more blossomed free.

But one day she woke up, no longer enraptured.
She rubbed her eyes, saw how she’d stumbled awry.
She scrambled for her scattered dreams and recaptured
them, strode to the door, and declared, “I am I.”
 

This week, Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect challenged readers to write a lipogram—a poem that avoids one or more letters of the alphabet.

Obviously, I chose the letter I, avoiding it until the final phrase. The poem doesn't include J, Q, or X, either, but high-scoring Scrabble tiles don't really count in Lipogram Land.

This week's Poetry Friday round-up is at Adventures in Daily Living!

Each week, Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect presents a Poetry Stretch, inviting everyone to write a poem of a particular form, on a particular topic, or so forth. She attracts some pretty big names in the children's poetry world, too. This week, though, I may be the first to respond to her challenge to write oulipos.

And to say I wrote them feels like a stretch, because I took the "S+7" option: take an existing poem and substitute each of the poem's substantive nouns with the noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary. Because I'm a youth librarian, I decided to try it with some nursery rhymes. (And I must confess to a small amount of fudging; the dictionary is full of weird abstract nouns that I decided to skip over.)
 

As I was going to Saipan,
I met a manatee with seven wikis.
Each wiki had seven saddles.
Each saddle had seven catalogs.
Each catalog had seven kiwis.
Kiwis, catalogs, saddles, wikis—
How many were going to Saipan?

I love the serendipitous rhymes— Saipan/manatee and saddle/catalog—and the inversion of kiwi/wiki. Two more:
 

Baa baa, black shekel,
have you any worms?
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bailiffs full.
One for my mastodon
and one for my damselfly
and one for the little bozo
who lives down the lantern.
 

Sing a son-of-a-gun of skateboards,
a podiatrist full of sabers.
Four and twenty black biscuits
baked in a piezometer.
When the piezometer was opened,
the biscuits began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dispatch
to set before the kipper?

Aaaand I'm left wondering, was that really the best use I could have made of the last hour? Ah, well! So it goes.

This week, Poetry Friday is hosted by Laura Salas, she of the 15 Words or Less poetry challenge (to which I contributed this week). Check out the round-up!