Constraintingbits;

hooray for them!

Yeswe, persons J & A seek in this Pagingplace to devise & apply Poetic Constraints of many types for to make fine Poemthings.

Th rules to this Beast (revised 2008-5-16):

1. Persons J & A devise two new poetic constraints each week for th Other to use in creation of two fine Poemthings.
2. Each Tuesday, persons J & A give instructions for writing two fine Poemthings using two separate constraints, adding th instructions on this page, beneath this innocent-looking horizontal rule, including for each a link to a page-not-yet-created.
3. During th period from Tuesday to Tuesday, persons J & A create new pages to fill in th links provided by th Other w/ fine Poemthings, following, more or less, th constraint described in #2. Each makes it his goal to complete all of two assignments w/i one week (but receives no penalty for writing zero or one).
4. On th next Tuesday, persons J & A add new assignments to this page to bring th Other's assignments back up to two for th following week. Thus, if J writes two during th week, on Tuesday A adds two new assignments; if A writes one during th week, J adds one new assignment.
5. & so on.
6. Also, if other humans out in th world want to get involved w/ this project - trading assignments, writing fine Poemthings - do get in touch! We like you!

AJ: alternating currents. Write a story in which vowels & consonants alternate.

JA: Palindrome trademark.  A single palindrome, with plenty of brand names included.

JA: snowball(sestina). Take as the first line (or so), the first complete sentence you hear spoken after reading this sentence. Write a sestina—metric constraint, or not, up to you. Use the last syllables from stanza 1 in stanza 2 (as usual), but for each subsequent stanza, retain one more syllable from the previous stanza's lines, building backwards from the line ends.

AJ: moment of sonnet. Write a 14-line poem which breaks its stanzas into groups of lines in th manner of a moment of symmetry scale. For example: into stanzas of 4, 1, 4, 1, 4 lines. Choose a rhyme scheme appropriate to th grouping. Bonus if you find additional ways to incorporate moment of symmetry.

AJ: slenderize slenderize. Write, find, or assemble a medium-to-large-sized stanza (or paragraph). Copy th stanza & slenderize it: freely delete characters, spaces, & line breaks so as to create a new, smaller stanza. Repeat this as many times as you like, creating smaller & smaller stanzas, finishing w/ a one-line stanza (or one-sentence paragraph). Then, reorder th stanzas freely, randomly, or according to some mathematical contraint.

JA: oaiii. Take the above text, the description of Constraintingbits. Boil out all formatting, numerals, spaces, and consonants, leaving only a syrupy vowel concentrate. Reconstitute by (non-anagrammatically) adding consonants and spaces.

JA: inning chart. Construct a network of nodes whose structure matches the positions (and possible throws) on a baseball field. connect every node with every other node using words and phrases, such that a number of poems can be created by tracing a ball's path in a series of plays.

JA: than bauk. simple (12-syllable) than bauk.

AJ: hoprock. Write a text in which every 9th word has some connection to th word rock (eg. stone, stoned, pebble, roll, Barack, mineral, etc.) & every 12th word has some connection to th word hop (eg. jump, scotch, skip, bunny, opium, frollic, etc.) When necessary, coin a word that incorporates both root words (eg. hoprock, jumpstoning, hock, rope, etc.). Begin th poem w/ th word hoprock.

JA: poem for a dogwalk. A short, singable poem which contains, phonetically but not visually, the names of several dogs.

JA: current chimera. Do a chimera (not the variation described). Begin with a text at least 100 years old. Modify it using three news articles/editorials from today.

AJ: isonymic pantoum. Write a pantoum which, aside from th necessary refrains, doesn't repeat a word. Topic suggestion: hatting.

AA: wedding poem for Dave and Casey. Write a poem for th wedding of yr pals Dave & Casey. In th first stanza, use only th letters in "David Camille Shaver"; in th second, use only th letters in "Casey Jean Chapman"; in th third & final stanza, combine th letters in both names. Copy it onto nice paper & stick th paper into th envelope w/ th card for them to find & enjoy.

AJ: subversive cento. Write a cento (a poem composed entirely of lines borrowed from other texts), with th following twist: Add one word to each line that in some way negates, subverts, or otherwise significantly alters th meaning of th original line.

JA: muddy syllosnowball. Write a 12-line syllabic snowball such that each line is a proposition, logical or otherwise, about the truth or falsehood of some other line.

JA: stereo limerick. Two limericks are placed side by side. Can be read in columns, as a pair of limericks, or straight across, going from the first line of one into the first line of the other, making a compound limerick. Topic suggestion: atavism.

AJ: modulating lipogram 1. Compose a poem of five stanzas. Write th first applying th prisoner's restriction (only including letters that don't go below or above th line: aceimnorsuvwxz). Write th second stanza applying th prisoner's restriction while also making it a univocalism on "e" (using no vowels but "e"). Write th third stanza applying only th univocalism on "e". Write th fourth stanza as a univocalism on "e" while also applying th left-handed restriction (include only letters & symbols you'd ordinarily type w/ yr left hand on a keyboard: `~12345!@#$%qwertasdfgzxcvb). Finally, write th fifth stanza applying only th left-handed restriction.

AA: hero. Write a poem using a Secret Constraint. Do not tell Jacob th Secret Constraint. Make him guess & squirm. Give him a clue: "Mathematics." See if it comes to him after a while. If it doesn't, if he goes completely insane, pulls out all him hair & says, "For th love of everything everywhere, tell me th Secret, man!" then tell him th Secret (if you feel so inclined). Jacob may peek at hints: hint1, hint2, hint3.

JA: dictionary double-transform seven. Find seven words in the English dictionary that have definitions of seven words or less. Make a poem that is an ordering of all of the words inside these definitions. Then, try as best you can to substitute in the defined words for their definitions, using various transforms (fractures, reversals). Break this glob of letters into seven new words. Pair them with the old words, and give each new word a definition with the same number of letters as its partner's. Then, pair up the words inside the definitions and transform the first poem into one that uses the new words' definitions. Add a final line: the teacher's grade of the poem, with a trite explanation. Note: Adjust the number seven as needed. Here, I'll do an exemplary ddt-four.

AJ: eccentric acrostic: First, give yr poem a title (other than 'eccentric acrostic'). Expand that title into a short (perhaps only one line) stanza by taking each letter in th title as th first letter in a new word. Then, expand that stanza into a second, longer stanza in th same manner, taking each letter in th first stanza as th first letter in a new word. If you wish, you may continue expanding from here to add further stanzas, or you may stop at two stanzas. Each expansion will more than double th length of th previous stanza, so two expansions may create a poem of goodly length for yr taste. Note: If you'd rather write 'prose' than 'verse,' you may write paragraphs instead of stanzas.

JA: neighbor naiku: a poem with three lines; "5-7-5" specifies the number of times in each line that two adjacent letters are also neighbors in the alphabet. Each neighbor pair will be in alphabetical order (cd not dc), and no neighbor pair is repeated.

AJ: st hubert plus: Perform a larding (sentence or word larding, poet's choice) of chapter 50 from Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies: The Vigil of St Hubert.

JJ: yearsum reverse snowball: on the eve of your birthday, write a reverse snowball poem, beginning with the number of years turn away from. then set the text to music (in a tuning somehow numerically based also on that number).

JA: anagrammy heteronol: Write a poem in which each line is an anagram of every other, yet no two consecutive lines have words of the same length. Make as long as possible.

AJ : pi octo pi : Write a poem in which each word has a number of letters equal to a digit in pi, starting w/ a three- letter word, then a one-letter word, then a four-letter word, etc, to any length desired.