Oulipost #9: HEADLINES

toast! biggest loser

stripped of dignity?

family wants answers

mom jailed over massage scheme

ottawans think pink

time to get to work

maybe they messed up her order?

racist barbie speaks up

sweat the small stuff

diamonds over gridirons

pervy come-on or movie hoax? you decide.

born to be a viking

out of their misery

what a mess!

master of his own destiny

seniors moment

end of the line

underachievers abound

it’s all about the tulips

the politics of fear

fuddle-duddle the middle-muddle

on a cold april day

SOURCES

Headlines from the Ottawa Citizen & the Ottawa Sun

PROMPT: OULIPOST #9: HEADLINES (VARIATION OF JEAN QUEVAL’S “CENT ONS”)

Compose a poem whose body is sourced from article headlines in your newspaper.

ELABORATIONS

I wanted to make use of both Ottawa papers for this exercise because I knew the Ottawa Sun, which is a tabloid-style paper with a tendency to be bombastic, would yield colourful results.  But the Ottawa Citizen netted me the last two couplets, so how could I resist?

JEAN QUEVAL

This challenge is based on Jean Queval’s Cent Ons, a collection of 100 magazine & newspaper headlines organized into five poems of twenty lines each. Like many oulipians, Queval was a prolific & versatile writer, critic & translator. I’m fascinated by his sense of play & experimentation. He wrote a sentence, which he claimed was the longest without punctuation marks. He played with the form of the novel & the sonnet.

As usual I'm getting my info from the fabulously thorough Oulipo Comendium.

READ my fellow Ouliposters’ poems here.