Create a 14-line sonnet sourced from lines from your newspaper that is divided according to the first five digits of the irrational number pi – that is, into stanzas of 3, 1, 4, 1 and 5 lines. As with the preceding sonnet assignment (see April 12) you may interpret “sonnet” as formally or as loosely as you wish.
Source material for today comes from the Life section of the newspaper, selected lines remixed. Originally I intended to mix all three pieces into one poem, but there was too much left over so I created two sonnets instead. As well as conforming to the line counts per stanza, these are irrational in choice of line length and the image mixes too!
To view other Ouliposters’ work, please visit the Oulipost blog here.
Irrational Anthems (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My two sonnets:
Update Your Status
Our latest gastronomical experiment, crickets.
A clever tweet, a shrewd hashtag going viral.
Retweets.Virtual call and response.
I fall prey to the numbers.
Disorder. Reaction, these mini versions of myself
more insignificant than nothing: unfriend, and block.
These are my own demons redefining the community,
an ever-growing web of ethereal ego boost.
Quasi-friends as cutthroat as high school cliques.
This social media echo chamber,
real humans, not only eerie presences.
Not being asked to the big dance
has distorted our collective sense of self-worth.
The social media cycle continues.
***
I Dozed Off for a While
I knew this would happen, my suitcase never first in the baggage claim area.
A cloud of irritation, the diaper had a lot to say, the little packet of cheese, too,
spooning the finest strained carrots the size of garbage-can lids.
The moment, captured down to the silk tassel on a perfume bottle of
delicate blossoms and blowsy blooms,
euphoria, a little from the grass, a little from the soil,
an element of synaesthesia, transposed into notes
every shape, every colour, every music.
Intimacy with all the raw materials, camomile, violet, cherry-blossom.
Father ran through all his routines, he was piercingly loud.
He ignored the withering glares from people passing,
packing about 75 bags for a flight
that wasn’t going to happen.
It was all quiet when I woke up.
CAS April 27, 2014
Pi: The Transcendental Number (Photo credit: tj.blackwell)
SOURCES:
Gilsdorf, Ethan, Looking for “Likes” in all the wrong places, Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 26, 2014 (K1, K5)
Fashion page Postmedia News, Bloom Sayers Ottawa Citizen print edition April 26, 2014 (K6)
Atkinson, Nathalie, a little from the grass, a little from the soil Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 26, 2014 (K4)
Ward, Bruce, Fly and cry: Screaming children on airplanes can bring out the worst in everyone, Ottawa Citizen, print edition, April 26, 2014 (K1, K5)
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Quillfyre 
I really liked your second one, Carol. Some lovely images there – especially in the 1-4-1. It’s hard to believe that we’ve almost completed this whole month together. Cool, huh?
Thanks, Barbara, I liked that one too. Yes, we are almost done, and I am both glad and sad. Always the April challenges provide a lot of poems for later tinkering. But I will be sort of glad to move away from newspapers as source, since it adds an extra constraint that takes often hours to work with. I’m too poetried out by the time it is done to write anything else for that day!