Oulipost # 10: SNOWBALL

I

do

the

mugo

dwarf

colour

weeping

monsters

boomerang

boomerang

monsters

weeping

colour

dwarf

mugo

the

do

i

Francis, Alissa. “Five tips to make your 2014 garden easier.” The Ottawa Citizen. D7.

PROMPT: SNOWBALL

This procedure requires the first word of a text to have only one letter, the second two, the third three, and so on as far as resourcefulness and inspiration allow. The first word of a snowball is normally a vowel: in English, a I or O.

From your newspaper, select a starting vowel and then continue adding words of increasing length from the same source article or passage. Challenge yourself further by only using words in order as you encounter them in the text.

[this exercise has nothing to do with cum swapping. sorry, I’m a perve. had to go there…]

ELABORATION

I couldn’t resist trying this backwards as well. Turns out that’s also a snowball form: the melting snowball. Melting snowballs are poems in which each word has one letter less than the previous.

FUN ACTIVITY

In the Oulipo Compendium, Harry Mathews mentions that another way to snowball is to snowball syllables. It’s called rhopalic verse. Victor Hugo wrote a poem called Djinns in this form. An avalanche is a sequence of snowballs. Try any of these out. Use SortMyList.com & sort words according to length.

Take a look at more Oulipian snowballs over at the FoundPoetry Review.