GAMES OF POETIC CONSTRAINT: Chester came up with these

Guess what, Floweries? I looked at the comments section. Thanks for the words. Chester suggested these! I love them! I love the artifice of games and the reality of what is produced. Right now, I am obsessively listening to Crystal Castles, playing with my magnetic poetry board, and listening to Anne Sexton read with the visualizer on on itunes. There are outskits on the fringes of the digital age, the analog age, totally worth embracing. First of all, game number 2 is an Oulipo game called PRISONER'S CONSTRAINT. Second, I have translated some Baudelaire poetry and some of what was produced by it was amazing. I strongly suggest ekphrastic or sound-based translations of foreign poems, and hell, maybe even some hybrids of what the poem sounds like with what a rough translation means. Also, check out this ROBOT: http://babelfish.altavista.com "1: You read a poem in a foreign language you don't understand, untranslated, into a tape recorder. Or have a friend read it. Then play it back and try to pick out words you think you hear in English. Use these words to start a poem. 2: Eliminating letters and attempting to convey a specific meaning is always challenging and usually yields impressive, textured results. For instance, limiting yourself to a single row on the keyboard, or eliminating the letters that dip down:g, j, p, q and y. But give yourself a task, like write a love poem to Maya Deren without using a or e, or write in the past tense with no 'ed' endings. Chance operations are always useful to subvert your ordinary default writing style. For example, you can use a deck of cards to determine the age, ethnicity, language and personality traits of characters, you can flip coins to determine tense, you can use the i-ching to plan everything from tone to number of paragraphs and words per page to verb usage. It's fun, but I usually only use these methods as starting points and let the writing carry itself after a while. Similar methods can be employed to make music, films, visual poems/ text collages, plays, etc. etc." Thank you, Chester! EVERYONE, PLEASE SUBMIT. WE ARE IN A POETRY DROUGHT RIGHT NOW, NOT JUST ON THIS SITE, but in the WORLD!!!!! SEND! YOUR! POEMS! NOWWWWWWW xoxo Russell