Oulipoem 24: April 24 — Homosyntaxism

I am using a recording app on my phone to read notes into. I knew it wouldn’t have homosyntaxism, but I was curious, so I spoke. It responded with: ‘almost in taxes’.

Be sure to check out some of the other posters, both in my comments below and at the FPR.

The prompt:

Homosyntaxism is a method of translation that preserves only the syntactic order of the original words. To give a rudimentary example, if N=noun, V=verb and A=adjective, the outline NVA could yield solutions such as “The day turned cold,” “Violets are blue,” “An Oulipian! Be wary!”)

Option 1: Choose a sentence from your newspaper source text and write as many homosyntaxisms as possible based on that same variation.

Option 2: Complete a homosyntaxism of an entire paragraph or article found in your text.

I, in my restless sleeping, had an epiphany. Of course, this is just a copy change, but with prose. For those who have never done one, it’s like a giant mad lib. Take out the nouns, verbs, adjectives and some adverbs, noting which are where. Leave a structural framework. When I did this exercise with poems, I left words like when, but, and, anything that was not major in meaning but helped me see the structure.

With this, you can try that with a bunch of short sentences, or find a short passage you like, put in line breaks, then replace words and tinker. After much casting about, I elected Option 1. I was helped in my decision when I read Mildred’s. She chose a VERY short sentence. Thus I was inspired.

The poem:

I am trying
I am looking
I am calling
I am searching
I am hoping
I am missing
I am seeking
I am leaving
I am passing

I am dying

The source:

I went for the Classifieds in the end. My source sentence was: I am searching.