Saturday, April 26, 2014

OULIPOST #26: BEAUTIFUL OUTLAW (BELLE ABSENTE)


The prompt:
The outlaw in question is the name of the person (or subject) to whom the poem is addressed. Each line of the poem includes all the letters of the alphabet except for the letter appearing in the dedicated name at the position corresponding to that of the line: when writing a poem to Eva, the first line will contain all letters except E, the second all letters except V, and the third all letters except A.
Choose someone mentioned in your newspaper to whom to address your poem. Compose a beautiful outlaw poem following the procedure outlined above and using words sourced from your newspaper text.
The process:
As usual, I picked a short name and a name of a man who was a champion of democracy in Myanmar. I found his name in the Obituaries. I wanted to make this a quality poem for obvious reasons. I enjoyed the process because searching and finding cool words was intellectually stimulating. Plus, I was in a Starbucks for part of the writing process and now I smell like coffee and cookies. It's sexy. 
This took me a long time. I found it difficult to focus on this rainy day. Plus, I was hungry. I changed tenses and played with words a bit but I swear I used just about every article in today's paper. 
The result:
Win Tin
Democracy champion saving subjects from stabilizing pay and questionably picky taxes
Handles sharks, runs a bar, catches grenades, puzzles even more by exes of newly jammed quotes
Quick-fixes vary with him, majority rules, but widely sized gaps appear
Diversify and back common people; a jab; a warning—faxed—quickly—vaporized, how?
Abuses cause vast, flash attacks when more neglected people unjustly freeze next quarter
Quite a bit of love goes through him, you see, with the evil & hazards here: 
Pride
War
Smallpox
Cockfights
But
Truth speaks justice...

Sources:
Several articles from The Boston Globe. 26 April 2014. Sections A-G.Print.


2 comments:

Trish Hopkinson said...

This turned out great! You had a nice variety of words to work with. I had to repeat some in mine... lack of Z words in the paper today :)

Nicole said...

Thank you!! I was shocked with the number of words that contained Z. There were several wordy articles in the paper yesterday, Iw as truly grateful.