Auto-Suggestion Poem #1 (NaPoWriMo 2016)

One of my favorite poetic exercises has always been found poetry, where you take a piece of prose text and attempt to transform it into poetry by adding line breaks and playing with spacing, etc. I love how this exercise highlights the importance of rhythm, scansion, and the layout of text in creating a poetic work.

(For arguably the best example of found poetry ever, check out Hart Seely’s collection, Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld.)

Lately, I’ve had it in my head to try a modern technology equivalent of found poetry:

Auto-suggestion poetry.

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Google Search Poem (NaPoWriMo 2016)

Author’s Note: This poem was supposed to post yesterday, April 12, but my blog somehow ate it.

Today’s prompt from the NaPoWriMo site is to write an index poem. I didn’t do that. Instead, I did what I think of as a modern technological equivalent:

A Google Search poem.

I chose several words, arranged them in the order I wanted, and entered them one-by-one into the Google search bar (technically, each search was the word followed by “is”). Google offered up between three and five auto-suggestions to complete each search. I limited myself to use a maximum of three of these suggestions per search term, in the order they appeared. Eh, voilà! A poem.

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The Office (NaPoWriMo 2016)

Today’s NaPoWriMo challenge is:

[T]o write a poem in which you closely describe an object or place, and then end with a much more abstract line that doesn’t seemingly have anything to do with that object or place, but which, of course, really does.

I’m not sure what I wrote for today is quite what they have in mind but it’s where the prompt took me.

I also want to make it clear: This poem does not describe my current workplace. It describes several previous places where I’ve worked.

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The Heritage of Rage (NaPoWriMo 2016)

Once again, I decided to try today’s prompt from the official NaPoWriMo site: write a tritina. To make it even more challenging, I used an online random word generator to come up with three words. (From another perspective, this could be seen as avoiding the work of thinking up three words for myself.) With three words randomly generated, writing this poem became mostly an act of galumphing.

I should probably note that this poem isn’t autobiographical. While my heritage is mixed (but overwhelmingly northern European), I don’t have any particular rage connected to it, nor do I yearn for an ancestral sky.

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Food (NaPoWriMo 2016)

The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today is a challenge to “write a poem about food. This could be a poem about a particular food, or about your relationship to food in general.”

Given the importance and prominence of food in all our lives, you’d think this would be a fairly easy task. Instead, I found my mind circling around the topic, jumping from one aspect of food culture to another, thinking about food in a variety of contexts. So rather than try to focus on one isolated idea, I used that jumping-circling itself as the jumping off point for my poem.

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