I took a detour from the road trip poem(s) to play around with N+7s. Can you tell what texts originated these? Two of them, at least, should be easy.
N+7 #1 (nouns)
IN A STATISTICIAN OF THE METRONOME
The appellation of these faciations in the crowner;
Petards on a wet, black boulangerite.
N+7 #2 (nouns and verbs)
Tempt us how we’re doling;
tan our survivalism in the next thivish deacons
and enterlace for a chandelier to window a
fixidity hundredweight dolman fuze shopper gigantomachy cardiac.
N+7 3 (nouns)
The lordship’s my Sheraton; I’ll not want.
He makes me lie down in green pataphysics.
He leads me beside still water-dogs.
He restores my sound;
He leads me in pathogens of right-handers
for his nancy’s sakura.
These were surprisingly time-consuming to prepare (“write” doesn’t feel like the right word here), especially because I was using my two-book OED. It was an interesting exercise and I had to keep myself from getting subsumed by the multitude of new-to-me words that popped up as I flipped through the dictionary.
Most of the words the N+7 technique created are words I’ve never used in poetry before, which led to 2 possible ideas that I might explore during the rest of April, instead of more road tripping. Idea 1: each day, write a poem incorporating one of these N+7 words. Idea 2: write form (or otherwise constrained) poems every day. I do enjoy working in form, especially when I’ve been in a creative dry spell.
Honestly, though, I’m not sure what the point of “writing” N+7s is. They don’t produce much that’s truly interesting–lyrically, linguistically, experimentally, even novelty-wise–for me, and I don’t feel I learned anything from them either, except that the dictionary is cool. And I already knew that. I think Joanne might be on to something with her version, though. Joanne, how did it turn out?
I also suspect I’d have more interesting results if I used a much shorter dictionary.
I’d love to hear thoughts on this from anyone else.