For the final day of NaPoWriMo, the prompt is a relatively simple one, and there is a tool to help with the task of assembling the word bank. This one comes from Douglas Luman, who is a wizard with tools to help with quite a few of these Oulipian style constraints. Today’s tool is phonewords, and it is a neat one. You select a phone number (7 last digits)  and a source text for the tool to perform its magic upon.  The tool generates a bank of words, every one made from the first letters that appear only for those 7 numbers from the telephone dial.

Head on view of a Rotary Phone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I used a second tool after that, the tautogram tool, because the word list comes as is, and I find it easier to stick with the list if I can check off the words as I use them. It also makes it easier if they’re in alphabetical order. The tautogram helps with that. There is also the sort tool. Depends whether you want strict alpha order or not.  Maybe overworking myself to do that, because writing the poem itself seemed to go much faster.  Here’s a link to the full description from Douglas over at Found Poetry Review.

http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/impromptu-30-douglas-luman/

Out of Time

Calm among the dead he fell,
head high, a man made mad,
one blackened hand coming back
out of the night, the final knock
to beat a man to nothing.

In the half light of a violet moon,
half human men tumbled dead,
nothing left of them but blind face,
bad back, black teeth and blood.
Each naked in a hole five feet behind
the lamentation of the living
and the tolling of teatime

Carol A. Stephen
April 30, 2016

240-5386 Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1321/pg1321.txt

1. S. Eliot, The Waste Land