Hi poets! Today we are going to find ourselves an arbitrary organizational structure to climb inside of with our poems. As we learned back on Day 3, constraints are our friends. This is why writing challenges work, why writing prompts “prompt” us. We give our worker bee brain a little problem to solve (or a big one) and she gets right on it. She gets right out of the way, with all of her doubts and hesitations, fretting and obsessing. And then our writer brain steps forward, the one with all the ideas, the one who rarely gets a word in edgewise, who makes unusual choices, who knows beautiful words, who will quietly remind us of something we knew once, and had almost forgotten, but which really should be written down.
Abecedarian. The idea behind an abecedarian poem is pretty simple. There are 26 lines and each one starts with a different letter of the alphabet, in order, from A to Z. For an added challenge, you can ask someone else to select the words for you. I once tried this with words my 5-year-old selected. Or you could make yourself a little list of four or five words of varying length for each letter and keep it by you while you write, seeing if you can make any of the words work as you go along.
I wanted to see what sort of words I would get if I typed each letter into everyone’s favorite search engine and looked through the little list of suggested searches that popped up. I realized those suggestions were real questions that people around the world had asked. Questions the magical algorithms thought I might be wondering too. I got totally sidetracked and enchanted by this idea of a poem capturing all of those random voices and their pleas for information. So, I did a variation of an abecedarian made up of Google suggested searches. It’s fun on its own and a few of the lines would make good titles for future poems. Here’s the result.
Queries of the Twentieth of April, 2018
Why are the flags at half mast?
Why bother?
Why can’t I sleep?
Why do cells divide?
Why is evolution true?
Why is Friar Laurence to blame?
Why go to law school?
Why have you forsaken me?
Why is it a sin to kill a mockingbird?
Why did Jesus have to die?
Why Kill Carl?
Why is liberalism failing?
Why me Lord?
Why not?
Why oh why?
Why do planes crash?
Why quit smoking?
Why read Shakespeare?
Why should we hire you?
Why are there no snakes in Ireland?
Why u always lying?
Why was virtual reality invented?
Why does water look blue?
Why is the X unknown?
Why do you want this job?
Why did Zeus give the box to Pandora?