Zelda's exercise, October 15

Posted on: Mon, 10/16/2006 - 12:06 By: Tom Swiss

Another Zelda's Inferno exercise. This one was a little more complicated:

1) Everyone in the group got a sheet of paper. They wrote a single line or phrase at the top, then passed the paper to the person next to them. That person wrote the "opposite", in the sense of "The Opposites Game" seen here, phrase on the next line, then folded the paper over so only their line was visibile, and passed it to the next person, who wrote an "opposite" line (which, this not being mathematics, was quite different than the first line). Each page was passed around until it had traversed the whole group. We all then looked at all the pages and each copied all the lines that we had written (one on each sheet). Those lines then provided source material for a poem.

My lines:

Stillness, like large bland lowlands
Sunlight shining from below, blindng me
Flesh unites us all
Naked to the sky, becoming one with it
everything is genuine, nothing is staged
Animals fled the land like rye hides the mind

My poem:

in this ritual
we are naked to the sky
revealing the flesh that unites us all
all creatures of bone and skin and sinew and blood
with that unity known
how can there be disharmony?

in this nakedness, nothing can be staged, everything is genuine
a light shines up
breaking the large bland stillness that hides the mind

2) poem from the following wordlist (themed on the phrase "happy happy joy joy")

fruit pies, orgasm, pavlov's dog, spirit, helmet, utopia, rainbow, zen, grass, chocolate, hysterical, puppy, tranquil, morning wood, dreams

hysterical transcendant rainbow orgasm
tranquil sleeping puppy spirit
earthy utopian zen dreams
lanquid loving morning lust
dirty genuine blurry reality