by Nathan Moore
For this installment of Games Poets Play, we’re going to have some fun with randomness and chance. Specifically, we’re going to play with the Random Sentence Generator over at the Creativity Tools site.
Here’s what we’ll do: Generate a random sentence and use that sentence as part of a short paragraph. Post what you come up with in the comments section. We’re not making masterpieces, and we’re definitely not writing poems — but we are practicing our writing skills by using unexpected language as a springboard for our own writing. The idea is that we get a chance to let language surprise us. My hope is that we can experience the way randomness can make us lose our bearings and, for a moment, we can be thrown out of our usual modes of thinking.
Here are three examples. Each uses a randomly generated sentence as the first sentence of a short paragraph:
The disturbance pauses around the goodbye. Its footprints mark the snow as it turns down an alley and gets lost. A velvet sack of money is hidden behind a dumpster. The disturbance stops and slips a lighter from its coat pocket. The bag burns.
The snag calculates! The snag knows your middle name! The snag wonders why you’ve been out so late and what it can do to save this relationship. The snag stretches between the couch and the living room. Why is the carpet damp?
Can a pure stray graduate? To set goals, write a numbered list. These are achievements best attempted when you’re covered in chalk dust. Look, we adore geometry but we’re suspicious of cubes. Please show your work.
Remember, we’re playing. Don’t worry so much about making sense. We’re not making an argument. We’re not trying to sell anybody anything. We spend so many of our hours trying to “communicate.” Here is a chance to make friends with absurdity. Have fun!
Nathan Moore is community director and columnist for Read Write Poem. In his spare time, he plays with his children and with fire. Never at the same time. He blogs at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.
Our article betters a booklet. Anyway, you would have taken out from the purple hat an orange rabbit smoking the Japanese flute like a long-lasting Native American prisoner and musician, an orange rabbit playing the violin with its ears when using its paws across the USA on a bike, we could have send the synopsis to the crocodile literary agent. Send it the synopsis, neither the hat nor the rabbit cauz it would have eaten them and therefore our article would never have bettered the distance the bike rode.
The warped apple bounces within whatever tender warp. It has a sense of fun and frivolity; never feels bruised by the experience. Simply keeps on moving and spinning, showing glowing cheeks to the world.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I like to show my glowing cheeks to the world.
A potato prizes the controller. A potato is a slave in its own mind. It should be free! It should be free! Throw off the tyranny of thermostats and timers! Let boiling grease spill where it may!
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Ouch!
These are great! You’re all making me want to write more of them.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Do it. Write more of them.
A lucky stiff cups a requisite. The number in his hands is two. Some were asked to manage stratospheric heaps, and those timed to bud and reach maturity with progressively less of their margins tolerating error. Small wonder the fortunate sob cradles the requirement with such a tender caution.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:01 pm
I think cupping a requisite is against most office and university policies these days.
The laughter adapts the thesis. The laughter wears a cloak of words and rambles in the ears of strangers. The laughter laughs in topic sentences, hollows out arguments and inserts pinpoint lights, wears a skirt made entirely of semi-colons, dances in iambic pentameter, reeks of sloppy syntax and stale rhetoric, has a tattoo made of staples, sneaks out back to huff concluding paragraphs, wakes up with faulty logic doodled behind its eyelids.
A powder decays. A powder decays and it has done all it can, is already decayed, is already minced, broken, torn to bits, all for the cause, all for whatever caused it to despair unto sacrifice, caused it to become the final stage of disintegration, of going from sense to nonsense, self to nihilistic other, to nothing short of nothing, of nothingness. A powder decays and what more can anyone ask, can anyone want. A powder decays and each particle of powder, of dust, decays into powder, goes out into the world, prepared to do as it must.
Calypso plays with the maracas.They have been reduced to powder. Not just any old powder but powder used to bring on suffering with lots of despair and decay guaranteed to cease all smiles together,the silly season’s rent-o-kill. Before nihilism set in those maracas could be shook like hot potato revolutionaries and once, like Dana’s glowing cheeks, were worthy of a world premiere.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Let’s get clear on which cheeks we’re talking about.
rallentanda replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:52 pm
I’ve always had a penchant for the non specific veiled in complex paranoia!
The interpreted conduct stops. It doesn’t stop moving. It doesn’t stop being. It doesn’t stop passing through time. It stops being identifiable. It turns its fidgeting knuckles into a mask and wraps its broken carpals into scarves around its bitten hair.
A subroutine revolts. The conduct without a name changes into another conduct without a name, not the first name or another.
Why won’t the grab extract arrest your independent angel? She’s no goddamn muse.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
I like how so many members are using repetition in these pieces. We must have Ret’s prompt on the collective brain.
I wish laughter would adapt my thesis to a state closer to done.
rallentanda replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:50 pm
A state closer to done would subvert the dominant paridigm and cause upset to silly season anarchists.Be a risk taker, put the thesis in a bottle and float it out to sea.
The worth behaves under the imperative. Sit. Stay. Speak. The worth hides under blankets of insecurity, trembling. The worth does not know its own definition, struggles with synonyms. The worth spots a dictionary on the evening bus and tries to catch its eye.
rallentanda replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Wimpy worth can forget flirting with dictionary.
Besides being full of himself, over stuffed with useless words and meanings he makes a point of never picking anyone up on the bus.I bet he’d make an exception for Wikepedia. She’s
doing so well .It’s only a chauffeured car for her these days,I believe.
My, this is fun – I did another one.
A wood suffers acceptance after an understood symptom: it has a complex about trees falling in its perimeters and no one hearing them. The diagnosis is simple paranoia. The wood needs to understand that everyone can hear a tree fall; it’s a goddamned tree and weighs hundreds of pounds. Even if a person doesn’t hear, certainly some bird or animal or insect will be startled by the sound. So the wood can finally accept itself – maybe. It spends all of its time now making sure that something is crawling in the undergrowth before it will drop even the slightest twig.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:34 pm
I love “simple paranoia.” I would hate to see complex paranoia.
Nathan replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:39 pm
I’m glad you think it’s fun Donna. I agree.
rallentanda replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:56 pm
I only this could go on forever!
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Did you get that sentence from the random sentence generator?
rallentanda replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:37 pm
No. Feldman sent it to me as a Xmas present. He doesn’t tell you everything, you know!
The telescope rocks the breach. It breaks the silence between the standard fisher’s bow and the rocky shore. Thin fog draped veil like over the cliff sides, Delmen pulls up his boots and prepares to jump off into the shallow of the water’s edge, tie the boat securely to its moorings and sort the fish for market.
Rallentanda, Feldman does not tell me *anything* these days. Since we stopped writing poems together, I have no idea how he is spending his free time.
rallentanda replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Feldman seems to like Sydney more than Seattle.
But then again that’s understandable, we have many more robots here than you do so he probably feels more at home.
I’ve tried to write poetry with him but he insists on using American spelling so I’m sending him back.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Please mail him first class, because he’s a first-class act all around.
The sales urge bushes the miscellaneous paradise. We are fixed in a buying frenzy. Eden will be ambushed by the economy. Global warming will fixate our membranes on crystal clear hindsight. IF we only knew what we don’t know now.
(I put the randomness in between the asterisks)
*The gasp absorbs the apathetic spirit underneath a holy*…. metaphorical breath blanket. The Apathetic Spirit is like a giant invitation to those of us who “get it” to offer ourselves as again, metaphoric, human bridges.
Electing (or being appointed) as human bridge can be exhausting.
I know this, intimately.
Some might protest and inquire *“Can the lecturer crown a myth?”*
To which this human bridge elects to smile and create the tiniest gasp which will then be poured out, through the breath, into a blanket which will warm his Apathetic Spirit and morph it into something completely different.
When can a persons accused lurk? Never. The accused are not to be possessed. Not while the phoenix gathers cinnamon sticks, nor while the conflagration crisps her.
The accused, the accursed, the unacceptable can freely lurk when the pastry is cracked. While the crackers pop. And in the interim. Most especially in the interim.
Each stroke examines the backspace. Strike, stike, stike. Erase the past. Start over. Type a new life then hit the backspace and
Type a new life then hit the backspace…
Type a new life then…
Type a new…
Type
Backspace.
The blood leaps upon a circumstance. And I stand in awe at how fast it grabbed it from my hands, and didn’t even look before it acted. It’s my fault, I guess, for dangling it in front of every chance I got.
rallentanda replied:
December 24th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Last sentence is brilliant!
The heroic dependence, smokes a bonus. Beyond all colossal imaginings was his dependence on women, some dreamers, some pragmatists, some just pathetic. He made himself believe at first that they were his friends; well the him that was the part that would admit to calculation would, that is. The other part, the that foolish heroic part, well, that just believed in the lies he told himself and then regaled others with after downing a few pings: that he was saving one from loneliness and the other from the desolation of widowhood. It was the third one on the quest, the journey toward the light of life,that stumped him, for it was love, or so the foolish hero thought. Quickly though, it turned to marriage and then to his financial and material dependence, which he abnegated and embraced at the same time. Finally, when he felt tethered by his own heart to her heart, the heart whose moonsongs he heard, he bolted. Continued on his journey, but this time, the woman kept him, kept him in cartons of cigarettes, and he was happy.
[...] For this installment of Games Poets Play, we’re going to have some fun with randomness and chance…. [...]
The flaw coughs beside the managing wit. A remedy resides inside his pocket. But mother said, stand upright, keep your hands out of your pockets now. He remembers now when he fell off the tricycle trying to climb a tree. Pockets might have saved him that day.
Sorry if that bearly makes some sense! I’ll try harder. Lots of responses. Good fun Nathan!
An inherent chase sings outside an estate. Popcorn, popcorn! Three bags full! Yours, all for a song! Sssh, quiet please, the estate has just set sail and your foot lingers on the dock. Step lively now, genes are not all that counts! This is an E-ticket ride. Here, fill this cup.