YA FUSION's First Exquisite Corpse

April is one of my favorite months and not just because my first child was born on April 1 or because we all finally crack out of whatever ice coma we’ve been in for so long. April is NATIONAL POETRY MONTH! Which rocks in so many ways.

This month, my latest piece of short fiction in verse comes out on the online journal Young Adult Review Network, www.yareview.net, and my writer's critique group and I are playing along on YARN’s site with their “Random Word Contest” judged by Morris and Printz Award-winning author John Corey Whaley.

To kick off poetry month on the YA FUSION site, we’re starting an Exquisite Corpse game, a game that originates from the Parisian Surrealist movement where artists or writers passed time in cafes by piecing together their own bits of inspiration. Authors played by writing a single line on a piece of paper, folding it, and passing it to the next writer. The only rules were that the lines must include the same grammatical structure and writers were not allowed to read the lines written before theirs. The results were often surprising, interesting, and beautiful. YA FUSIONites are all of those things! So let’s create our own Exquisite Corpse. Here are the rules:



Exquisite Corpse drawing done by
Surrealist artists
 



1. Write one line about an outstanding positive or negative moment/feeling/event/person during yours or someone else’s teen years.

 

2. Follow this grammatical structure: Adjective, Noun, Verb, Adjective, Noun

 

3. Adding “function words” like articles or prepositions is okay as long as the basic structure is intact. 

 

4. While people post, don’t read the others until after you add your own. Let it stand alone and be completely original. That will make the poem more interesting!

 

5. At the end the month, I’ll string all the lines together to create a single poem by our bloggers and readers.

 

 

Here is an Exquisite Corpse example written by poets.org’s staff:

Slung trousers melt in a roseate box.

A broken calendar oscillates like sunny tin.

The craven linden growls swimmingly. Blowfish.

A glittering roof slaps at crazy ephemera.

Of course, we can do so much more in our YA way! I can't wait to see what it turns into! Leave a contact email in your post. If it turns out well, I'll send you a YA FUSION bookmark with the poem on it.

 

So to begin, here is my YA-related Exquisite Corpse line: 

 

Our cigarette smoke rings lasso shimmering stars.

 



Now no more reading until you post yours below! Have fun!!

 

                          *************UPDATE*********************

 

With National Poetry Month fading with the last hours of April, here is the final YA Fusion Exquisite Corpse poem. Thank you to all who participated!!

A skinny girl rides the wind.

Angry boy imagining happy man.

Empty houses tempt young hearts.

 

The gurgling stream snakes through the gentle forest.

Pink cherry blossoms open warm touches.

Our cigarette smoke rings lasso shimmering stars.

 

Your tar-black eyes sink my optimistic spirit.

Embarrassed girl passing out in front of cute boy.