QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 23 INVENTORY

Posted on April 23, 2014 by quillfyre

Inventory is a method of analysis and classification that consists of isolating and listing the vocabulary of a pre-existing work according to parts of speech. Choose a newspaper article or passage from a newspaper article and “inventory” the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, articles, etc. Bonus points for creative presentation of your final lists.

To see what the Ouliposters have come up with for their vocabulary analysis, check out the Oulipost blog here: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/oulipost-23-inventory/

After choosing my source text, I realized that it would be a marathon session if I did the analysis before whittling down the text, so I created a draft poem to work with, and analysed the vocabulary that I used in the poem. I worked with Dictionary.com and a parsing tool, which sometimes used unfamiliar terms like “determiner”. Dictionary.com used more familiar classifications.

Here, then, is the analysis, with each word, within its category, listed in order of appearance in the poem:

Vocabulary Inventory

• Adjectives: Irresponsible, any, illegal, convenient, local, some, few, some, heavy, red, best, this, government-controlled, inconvenient, wrong, readily available, own, squeamish, nervous, strange, silliness, rational
• Adverbs: more, down, when,
• Articles: a, a, the, the, the, the,
• Conjunctions: and, and, or, and, and, but,
• Interjection: sorry
• Nouns: bacon, research, portion, store, pack, bacon, people, moderation, slices, breakfast, cottage, doughnuts, cupcakes, seafood, users, meat, cheese, burgers, stuff, substance, bacon, carcinogen, consumers, choices, meat, booze, laws, kind,
• Noun phrases: grocery store, cancer risk, status quo
• Prepositions: in, with, to, of, in, with, at, on, around, onto, in, to, of, from,
• Pronouns: it, it, you, it, others, it, it, it, it,
• Possessive pronouns: your, their, their
• Proper nouns: Ontario, Ontario, Beer Store,
• Possessive noun: Ontario’s,
• Verbs: to allow, shows, increases, make, don’t, make, imagine , could go, pick, consume, sprinkle, wrap, layer, to keep, is, known, make, comes, gets, is, might change, trying, to make, look

Here is the poem that uses the vocabulary inventoried above:

Bacon ‘n’ Booze Control

I.
Irresponsible to allow bacon in Ontario grocery stores.
Research shows cancer risk increases with any portion.
Make it illegal, don’t make it more convenient.
Imagine you could go down to your local store
and pick up a pack of bacon.

Some people consume it in moderation —
a few slices with breakfast at the cottage—
others sprinkle it on doughnuts and cupcakes
or wrap it around their seafood.
Some heavy users layer it onto red meat
and cheese in burgers. Best to keep this stuff
government-controlled and inconvenient.

Meat counter: Prosciutto (top two rows), salami and bacon, roast beef. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

II.
Sorry, wrong substance. Bacon is
readily available – known carcinogen.
Consumers make their own choices
when it comes to meat.
But booze? Ontario gets squeamish.

Toronto, Canadá (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Beer Store is nervous
Ontario’s strange laws might change,
the kind of silliness from trying
to make the status quo look rational.

CAS April 23, 2014

Source: Kate Heartfield, Fearmongering about alcohol gets ridiculous Ottawa Citizen print edition April 23, 2014 (A11)

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 22 ANTONYMY

Posted on April 22, 2014 by quillfyre

In Oulipian usage, antonymy means the replacement of a designated element by its opposite. Each word is replaced by its opposite, when one exists (black/white) or by an alternative suggesting antonymy (a/the, and/or, glass/wood).

Original: To be or not to be, that is the question.
Antonymy: To not be and to be: this was an answer.

Select a passage from your newspaper source text to complete this exercise.

To view a variety of Antonymy poems today, visit the Oulipost Blog here:

http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/oulipost-22-antonymy/

So, at first read, how hard can this be? As it turns out, it’s a bit tricky. Remembering to change negatives to positives and past to present, and vice versa, as well as simply doing the antonyms for nouns made it easy to miss some. However, it was one of the challenges I really liked, and I ended up doing both of the two pieces I chose as alternatives. I hadn’t been sure which would work, had intended to combine them, then found enough for two poems.

(I can’t decide which I prefer, so I present them in the order I wrote them.)

A Silence Out of Mid-Summer

At an end was not a silence
the loss, a denial.
One doesn’t repulse.
You last hated far from
anywhere, before 2014.
You are not forty and fifty.
Death isn’t inside-out water sieves
or sand dunes.

Sand dunes in Morocco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I never sit under a water sieve
nor step out of a dune.
Everything, and sorrow
unfairly complicated or unfairly sad
outside a meadow unfenced in scrub.

Losses don’t halt neglect.
You never see in front of you
but you never think you are sad.
You always think you are an outsider.
You aren’t a woman without the high silence,
indifferent not to be the opera diva,
not to speak classical arias before classical
is popular. You are that bad,
and give up the dabbler apathy.

Nobody that detested an ignorance
about assembly-line painting, the curse
which ended in a silence out of mid-summer.
43 above in here, South of 44, dead outside the attic
miserable outside a stranger’s skeleton.

It is aimless now or it was aimless then.

CAS April 22, 2014

Buy the Pigeon, Sell Carnivores

Plug in a softener after you return from work.
Uncreative unplanned waste, absolute underground cool
has fallen 980 amperes Fahrenheit. Deserts were alkaline
or equatorial water shoes were frozen. Red waste was
less conservative, moderate red questions to the inside towns
plausible, and walking the dog, out-of-control disconnect.

Waste gorging. Buy the pigeon, sell carnivores,
fertilize clay or poop out isolated vegetables,
dying under usual seascapes, water less simply avoided
as clumsy claws. Pigeons aren’t noisier and dearer,
nor more dangerous to mineral fertilizers, but gather loss
pesticides as well as diamond inhalations. Individuals
won’t unionize, but leisure participations were maxed out.

Plastic tree-wasting dilemma. Extract 4 reams of A10 envelopes
out of the aptly unlabeled Black Pigeon stickpile, but 3 hours before
the plastic dilemma rolls in. Out of this 3 hours the stickpile
assembles, forms, thickens, wets, but spews next century’s surplus
out of plastic. Ten stickpiles waste 6 oak twigs daily, forget about
adding machines never occupying a square foot.

Twig death. The giant asteroid is solidifying. Alien births exclude
some dirt, scratched glass, papier mache or epinephrine, none
buried at a temporary launching pad above naturally-fed desert.

A disassociation does not make life all the less joyful.
Dust of a life cannot kill the crocus.
We cannot remain the seed.

CAS APRIL 22, 2014

Rock Doves on the Empire State Building (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sources:

Robb, Peter, The Voice, Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 22, 2014 (C1, C8)

Kielberger, Craig & Marc, If you were a tree, what would you be? Ottawa Citizen, print edition, April 22, 2014 (C1, C8)

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 21 CONFABULATION

Posted on April 21, 2014 by quillfyre

Today’s Oulipost challenge:

Craft a conversation poem using “he said/she said” quotes that you find in newspaper articles.

Sounds relatively straightforward compared to some of the constraints we’ve had. Just a matter of finding enough material and then making it work at least on some level. IN developing my conversation, I didn’t always use the full quote, and sometimes combined parts of two quotes.

My fellow Ouliposters share their work here:

http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/oulipost-21-confabulation/

And here is my effort for today:

Suffused and Confused

I don’t know what to do, she said.
That’s the way it goes, he said.

None of us understood snippets.
That’s just the way it is; just the way it goes.

It was hard to hear what happened.
Good food and dog excrement blended up together.

We need to start thinking about what we’ll use it for. Be intentional.
I think that’s a load of crap.

Difficult to switch. We could see the smoke.
I saw the shot coming. It was like slow motion.

We’ve made history here. They’re going to give us ponchos.
A bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid with ideas that are crazy.

No one had cell phones. We had to get out of there.
Technology is the saviour of everything. Robots doing it all for you.

No conflict; don’t know how they’re going to secure spectators.
We are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil.

I’m typically blue within 20 minutes. Mission accomplished.
Everything is greener. There’s a lot more oxygen. It got absurd.

I wasn’t suffused with faith and joy. We finished running.
So long to get here, to be honest. Nothing practical left.

The end of a pencil: the remains of man’s genius.

CAS April 21, 2014

SOURCES:

Spears, Tom, “Seismic platelets:: How a phoney paper got accepted by scientific journals, Ottawa Citizen, April 21, 2014 (A1-A2)
Sibley, Roger, Trapped beaver tale has a happy ending, Ottawa Citizen April 21, 2014 (A1, A6)
Thomson, Stuart, Getting ready for The Singularity, (A5)
Sylvester, Maggie, Ottawa strong again for Boston, Ottawa Citizen April 21, 2014 (B3)
Simpson, Peter, A gift to last, Ottawa Citizen, April 21, 2014, (D1)
Desaulniers, Darren, Carleton Place crowned, (C3)
Figura, Peter, Canada makes big gain in Fed Cup (C7)

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 20 LESCUREAN PERMUTATION (PLAIN)

Posted on April 20, 2014 by quillfyre

Select a newspaper article or passage from a newspaper article as your source text. Switch the first noun with the second noun, the third noun with the fourth noun, and so on until you’ve reached the end of your text.

To read other Permutations, visit the Oulipost blog here: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/oulipost-20-lescurean-permutation-plain/

I’ve highlighted the words changed, so the original text that I selected from the article and shaped into a poem, can still be read here as well, simply by switching the nouns back. I did swap one or two noun phrases. And changed plurals and singular forms where needed. I didn’t have an even number of nouns in the selected text, but the next noun in the article itself was Gros Morne Park, substituted for the word century, which had no further noun spot to use it. I changed the article to the French form of at, for sense.

Here, then, is my Lescurean Permutation, Plain. I didn’t get fancy with it!

English: Norse long house recreation, L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Slate Grey Vikings and Africa from West
This boggy tip of Newfoundland’s northern landscape,
the sullen winds hang low and icy Arctic sky
sends shivers through stunted centuries; the tallest,
though a conifer old, barely above trees.
Just beyond the eye level, the slate grey Vikings.

Atlantics lived here, thrusts where two
epic L’Anse aux Meadows of human east, migration
and Africa from west met, Newfoundlanders
and Greenlanders’ indigenous eyes locked people.

These are the buildings of Viking remnants,
on a damp, chilly, windswept September, late day,
prominent meadows in a grassy undulation.
Forgotten, a fireplace.

Here was a millennium, a forge, the doorway where
local bog artifacts were smelted. Here, humble iron unearthed:
needles, bone sewing nails, a building.

Inside, a grass-covered sod cloak pin, recreated
Norse distance grouped a short structure from the items.
Handcrafted ruins, wooden furs, shields, and
simply embroidered tales tell old Norse fabric.

The coast hugs the western Viking Trail of peninsula’s northern Newfoundland,
vast ways, all the views to stacks, past countless Labradors of traps,
old-school lobster firewood, houses of colourful clapboard clusters.

On rocks of coloured, patterned beach the remains, rusty SS Ethie’s,
à Gros Morne Park after she ran aground.
CAS April 20, 2014

English: The Meeting of Two Worlds, sculpture, L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Sculptors: Luben Boykov, a Newfoundland immigrant and Richard Brixel, a Swedish national, unveiled on July 5, 2002 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

SOURCE:

Maunder, Patricia, Newfoundland’s Viking connection, Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 19, 2014
View Labrador from west coast Viking Trail (K4)

Quillfyre

Aspiring to poet

Tag Archives: Ottawa Citizen

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 23 INVENTORY

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 22 ANTONYMY

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 21 CONFABULATION

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 20 LESCUREAN PERMUTATION (PLAIN)

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