OULIPOST 8: WHEN THE TWEETING STOPPED

I am behind and feeling like Alice running after the White Rabbit with the stopwatch.' Not enough time. I'm late.'

Day 8's prompt was BEAUTIFUL INLAW (BEAU PRESENT).

'Select a name from one of your newspaper articles, famous or not. Compose a poem using only words that can be made from the letters in that person’s name. For example, if you selected “John Travolta,” you may only use words that can be made from the letters A, J, H, L, N, O, R, T and V.The use of web-based tools is highly encouraged to help uncover different words that can be made from your letters of choice. One tool you might consider is the Scrabble Word Finder.'

In the newspaper that day was news of the sudden death of 25 yr old Peaches Geldof. Last week our neighbours cut down a magnificent pink Magnolia. I'd been wanting to write an ode to the tree. I tried to do the exercise but the tree and Peaches' tragic early death kept merging. So, I cheated again, and wrote the poem calling me.

WHEN THE TWEETING STOPPED

 

‘Me and my Mum,’she wrote beneath the photo.

Magnolia campbellii has astonishing goblet flowers.

Faces close, their blond pony-tails centre-headed

Icons of spring and summer.

Peaches lost Paula when she was 11 years old

The Magnolia tree next door was 25 years old

when the neighbours axed her down.

‘From a family often fractured but never broken’

Magnolia grandiflora flowers before leaves emerge.

‘She was the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest.’

The enchanted tree was not sick

Her death was sudden and unexplained.

No group of trees is so highly appreciated.

169,000 fans followed her every tweet.

Magnolias in the wild are pollinated by primitive wingless beetles.

Her second name was honeyblossom.Birds sang in her boughs.

The flower buds of Magnolia salicifolia are used to treat headaches, allergies, Parkinsons, and cancer.

‘We loved her and will cherish her forever.’

She left two small children, a husband and father

She left us the neighbours.

‘Writing ‘was’ destroys me afresh.’

‘We are beyond pain.’

 

Janet Daniel, April 11 2014. The Guardian, 8 April.

Bob Geldof’s tribute to his daughter.

OULIPOST 7 'DAYLIGHT ROBBERY ON THE NORTH STAR'

I didn't really know what Iambic pentameter is. There were no examples in the prompt. My friend helped me recognise ten syllable phrases in my newspaper, but I wasn't inspired by the result, so we turned to today's prompt.
'Select a passage from one of your newspaper articles. Replace each noun in te passage with the seventh noun following it in the dictionary.'

This was much more fun. Although, I have cheated- a bit!

DAYLIGHT ROBBERY ON THE NORTH STAR

 

Sciatica hollows

where the yin temptress

shows-off the weepie’s smoking jacket-

a Yiddish weave-

with levity and levitation.

Daylight robbery on the North Star.

The poltoon with time-off and yellow fever

looks south-south-east for filberts.

 

Janet Daniel

April 7 2014

From:  The Times Saturday April 5 2104, P.13. ‘Breath of fresh air as weather turns.’

OULIPOSTER # 5 TAUTOGRAM 'CROCKETT'

Saturday's prompt is:

'Compose a poem whose words-or at least the principal ones- all begin with the same letter. The words must be sourced from your newspaper.'

As I'm on a playwriting course tomorrow, I decided to have a go today.

I chose an article,' Catastrophe averted as pet discovered trapped in sofa,' by Ben Kendall in the newspaper, I -the essential daily briefing, April 4,4014.

I chose the letter 'T'.

CROCKETT

Ten year old Tabby

tucked-up

in the taken-apart three seater.

Thought lost.

Taken into town,

trapped.

Trapped.

Trapped.

TRAPPED.

Trapped,

'til two claws

and a miaouw

turned lost to found.

Janet Daniel

April 4 2014.

OULIPOSTER # 4 FIBONACCI (VARIATION) 'FOR SALE & RENT'

Today's Oulipost prompt is:

'In a Fibonacci sequence, each term is the sum of the two terms immediately preceding it; typically with 1 as the first term: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5,8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on.

Select an article from your newspaper and create a poem using the words that correspond with the numbers in the sequence. Your poem will take the form of first word, first word, second word, third word, fifth word, eighth word, thirteenth word, etc. You can continue until you’ve run out of words in your article or until you’re happy with the poem’s conclusion.'

How I hated this. All that counting and all I got was some pronouns, prepositions, adjectives, and linking words (what are they called in English grammar?). First I wrote a piece of prose, hoping to drag a poem out kicking and screaming. Nought. So then I peeped at other Ouliposter's entries to see how they'd dealt with the challenge, and saw that they'd been far less ambitious. So here's my effort, although hardly a poem.

I used an article in yesterday's (3 April 14) Guardian newspaper by Suzanne Moore, 'Sold Subject to Contract'

FOR SALE & RENT

It was small via cramped.

Because it was smaller, rentable

with the small pension.

Janet Daniel

April 4 2014.

OULIPOSTER #3 DEFINITION LIT. 'TOO GEEK FOR HIS OWN GOOD?'

TOO GEEK FOR HIS OWN GOOD?

­

Today's Ouliposter task was:

'Select a single sentence from a newspaper article. Replace each meaningful word in the text [verb, noun, adjective, adverb] by its dictionary definition. Repeat this treatment on the resulting sentence, and so on, until you’ve had enough! Note that after only two such treatments with a relatively compact dictionary, even a two-word sentence can produce an accumulation of 57 words.'

I chose an article from The Guardian UK newspaper, April 3 2014 by Krisnan Guru-Murthy. The Making of Miliband. He is an MP and the leader of the Labour Party, currently in opposition in the government.

'If Miliband is, in truth, an obsessive political geek who cares little about pop music or going to the pub, that in itself will not stop him from being a popular political leader.'(33words)

I realised half way through that it was far too long a sentence, but I persevered.

If Miliband is in the state of being true, thinking continually about something relating to government, a person who is unfashionable or awkward in the company of other people, who feels a small amount of concern about modern commercial music with a strong melody and beat, or moving to a building in which an alchoholic drink made from fermented malt flavoured with hops, and other drinks are served, that in itself will not bring to an end the nature of a person relating to politics, to be liked or admired by many people and to be a person or thing that leads. (102words).

And I started to wonder what is the point...

If Miliband is in the condition of someone or something existing in accordance with fact or reality, his ideas or opinions constantly or often occurring, having no interruptions, about an unspecified or unknown thing, feeling sympathy for the group of people who govern a state; he, an individual human being who is not popular, nor fashionable, is causing or feeling embarrassment,who is aware of not a large total of worry about views of those widely held relating to the present or recent times, making or intending to make a profit in the art of combining the sounds of a voice or instrument in a pleasing way with a physically powerful tune in a main accent, or in motion from one particular position or area, in which a colourless flammable liquid, which is the ingredient that gives drinks such as wine, beer, and spirits their intoxicating effect, are served; that in itself will not cause the final part of something, the inborn qualities or characteristics of a person concerning sense and wisdom in the circumstances, find pleasant,satisfactory or regarded with respect by many human beings and one who causes a person or animal to go with them. (196w)

So I decided to strip back down to the essentials and came up with a Haiku.

TOO GEEK FOR HIS OWN GOOD?

Does being a geek

make Miliband a leader

because or despite​?

Janet Daniel

April 3 2014

OULIPOST 2 LIPOGRAM: 'PUPAE POP UP'

 PUPAE POP UP

Osborne pledges full employment to woo votes.

He wanted the UK to be the best place; to create a job, to get a job,

to keep a job, to be helped to look for another job.

Feels better when you have a plan.

Rodents, where ever we travel, they do too.

Slow never felt so fast.

Japan has been ordered to end whale hunts.

Banks broke 'deals' over sell off.

Scotland could not keep the pound, purged

of the MPs from a country that was soon to separate from the rest of the UK.

Rodents, where ever we travel, they do too.

Dads who stay at home-should they not have advanced the most powerful argument of the lot?

Attempts to guarantee a job to every person are doomed.

Thousands more non-human heart beats stutter.

Rodents, where ever we travel, they do too.

Slow never felt so fast.

There are shudders at the top.

Panorama sources leaked before the show.

They can do nothing about the context.

Rats are seen by some as our natural successor.

Rodents, where ever we travel, they do too-

the era of the rat.

Janet Daniel

April 2 2014

Oulipost #2 Lipogram*

From: 'I'  (UK daily newspaper. April 1 2014)

 *(Poem not using letter i in title of newspaper)

OULIPOST # 1: APRIL FOOLS

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion. Five a day is not enough to stay healthy. It is somewhere between 12 and 18 courses. It is four hours of eating and it is pure, total theatre. This is why he removed a computer and a jiffy bag containing pornographic DVDs from his Chelsea Harbour home. Being a Mummy is the hardest job in the world. All we have is a chain of inferences and suspicious activity. There is no evidence of his presence. I don't think it'll last very long. I don't think you can be for very long a citizen of nowhere. This would have made a very traumatic time in the history of life far worse. It could have been the killer blow that led to the biggest mass extinction we've known. Many of the failings in this serious case are similar to others: people didn't talk to each other. You spend a third of your life asleep and yet we don't make the most of that, we think we just turn our brains off and so concentrate on our waking hours. It's very likely there are significant lessons. It's been my dream to do this, bring an original take on this content and bring it out to the world.

Janet Daniel

April 1^st 2014

Quotes from: i Essential daily briefing for Independent, April 1 2014. No 1,044