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)

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