Excercises in style

Hey poemries,





Oblog here. I have an idea. What about doing a communal poem type thing based on small narrative repeated in loads of different styles just like Queneau's Excercises in style.





I thought our initial text could be an introduction to a poem and then we repeat the same intro in a different stlye. Some examples from exercises in style include . . . .





reported speech, passive, exclamations, onomatapea's (I know I didn't spell that right, you know what I meant), haiku, mathematical . . . .the possibilities are endless and it would be quite funny to play around with the whole ridiculously long intro to a peom thing that we all do from time to time.

I could post up a 80 word starter and we could each reproduce the text in a few different styles. For performance maybe we play around with reading over each other a bit or reading some bits together? I don't know?





What do you guys think?

Check out this comic version based on the same idea

making postcards

Hey guys - I have a little home printing machine called a print gocco which we can use to make postcard poems specially for the reading. It's cheap, so we could give them away to people as mementos. There's a flickr group here which shows the sort of thing you can produce, so we could incorporate words and pictures.

We can even accomplish this at a distance, if you have access to a computer: you just use a programme like paintshop to make a postcard-sized image (eg. 14x10cm), then email it to me as a jpeg or pdf file. I can print it out and photocopy it at the print shop up the road, and then use the photocopy to make the postcards.

You've both seen my DeTour postcards I think - I made them with the Gocco. The only restriction is that it's quite hard to get different colours bordering each other, unless you use multiple screens.

What do you think? We could work on designs and post them up here. In fact, I'm going to add one now, an old postcard I made (by hand, not by Gocco):





Ideas: souvenirs, mementos, calling cards, poetry readings, Luton(?).

Jamie

Emcees

What we need to read our names: List of words (please add to using a dictionary). I think about 16 for each, and one person can read forward from each list, the other backwards. The letters are enough to spell out A-B-I-O-B-O-R-N-E, H-O-L-L-Y-P-E-S-T-E-R and J-A-M-E-S-W-I-L-K-E-S.

• A - abbreviated, abdominal, abetting, abhored, abject, ablative, ablaze, abnormal, abolished, abortive, above, abrasive, abrupt, absolute, abstracted, absurd.
• A - amateur, amatory, ambassadorial, ambidextrous, ambient, ambiguous, ambitious, ambulatory, amenable, amiable, amidships, amiss, amnesiac, amoral, amphibious, amplified.
• B - bathing, batik, bats, bawdy, beachcombing, beady, beamy, beanpole, bearded, bearing, beastly, beaten, beatific, beatnik, beavering, becalmed.
• B - blockheaded, bloodless, blotchy, blotto, blowy, blue, bluffing,
• E -
• E -
• E -
• E -
• E -
• H -
• I -
• I -
• J -
• K -
• L -
• L -
• L -
• M -
• N -
• O -
• O -
• O -
• P -
• R -
• R -
• S -
• S -
• S -
• T -
• W -
• Y -

It's a lot of work to copy out all the words (unless someone knows an online dictionary that can be cut and pasted?) so first maybe we should discuss if it's a good idea. I think it's an OK idea, but it could be better. How could it be improved?

Jamie