Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Syntax With Playing

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg suggests taking a few lines fron a less than stellar bit of work and playing with the syntax, scrambling the words and adding punctuation to make new sentences out of them.

What the hell--we've all seen most of the quiz results we're interested in on blogthings dot com, anyway, right??

For starters:

You forget to write down the echoey hollowness of the house. You forget how being alone feels strange like a shirt with one sleeve, turned inside out. You forget you have to set limits. You forget the amazing perfume of orange blossoms when spring shakes her hair down.

And here we go:

Forget echoey perfume hollowness, forget orange blossoms alone. You, when a shirt shakes, set limits! House, you forget being inside alone. Write down, write down! Amazing limits of you; strange like orange. Limits down, forget when you write. Write inside out like the shirt, one sleeve alone when spring blossoms. Feel you down, set hair limits, strange shakes turned orange.

Hmmm. That has some possibilities, it do.

Anyone remember Rachter?? That second set feels a lot like that program. I wonder what would happen if I assigned a numeric value to each word, dropped it through random.org for five-ten word sentences, then tweaked the results a tad for found poetry for ATC's??

Must play soon. Must play soon. All work and no play makes Spike forget limits.

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