Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a writing exercise

Posted on: Sun, 03/08/2009 - 20:42 By: Tom Swiss

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a writing exercise. Sort of recursive but fun.

Write a poem or series of poems in which you accomplish the following:

1. tell your secret name in the form of a series of riddles
2. provide the specific and articulable facts that lead to a reasonable suspicion that the universe is, from some perspective, beautiful
3. love your words
4. i mean, select twelve words at random from a newspaper, magazine, book, or street signs, and fall in love with them. Madly, deeply. Let them haunt your dreams. If those words reject you, contemplate suicide -- but do *not* carry it out. Just get righteously stinking drunk and slip into a months-long depression. (For extra credit, let your failed relationship with these words inspire major life changes.)
5. use iambic pentameter, or other meter than Iambe might dicate. (For extra credit, use a meter approved by Iambe's father, Pan.)
6. explain where the flowers are before they bud upon the tree
7. provide a schematic diagram of the starry dynamo of the machinery of night
8. Americans and Europeans see a man's face in the light and dark patches of the moon. The Japanese see a leaping rabbit. Give another interpretation.
9. weave a net to capture a dragon.
10. write the poem that will lure the dragon into the net
11. write the poem that will free the dragon from the net.
12. end your poem with a reflection of the glorious crystalline structure of space-time that will trigger the satori of at least one reader. if you can't manage that, end with a deliberate obfuscation so that everyone ends up equally confused.