Poetry Bake-Off Grand-Slam Round-Robin Thingummy

This afternoon, at a green picnic table under the sweetgum trees in Portland's Westmoreland Park, a Grand Experiment in Poesy was conducted by four Utterly Dedicated Writerly Types, amid the fanfare of shrieking children on the playground and honking geese in the close-cropped clover.

Said Writerly Types included myself, my husband Tyler, my mother-in-law Elaine, and my sister-in-law Kate.

Here's what we did (a.k.a. “Methods” section):

1. I gave everyone a verbal prompt, which was, off the top of my head, “With the rocks whirling in the flatlands, the daffodils...”
2. Each of us did a 15-minute freewrite (“Write whatever comes to mind, as fast as it comes to mind”).
3. Each of us passed our completed freewrite to the person on our left, who then read it through, underlining whatever words/phrases struck his or her particular fancy.
4. The underlined freewrites were then passed to the left again.
5. Each of us constructed a poem by rearranging, trimming, and punctuating the collection of underlined phrases that we'd been given by the person on our right.

Here are the four poems we created together in this manner (a.k.a. “Results” section):

I. (freewrite by Elaine, selection by Kate, poem by Tanya)

So happy to catch

the slight misfortune

of someone else:

a little vase set just so

in the sunshine,

the lacy edges of enlightenment

a blithe “meanwhile....”

Nothing to see, no dizzying jumble

out of the corner of an eye:

nowhere, whirling in circles.

II. (freewrite by Tyler, selection by Elaine, poem by Kate)

Humble wild eeps – mumble apologies

to maligned German tourists

in Brooklyn.

Let it speak for itself!

Don't choke on spaghetti squash and

peppercorns.

An inauthentic botanical,

not a Hollywood stunt double

or W. Bush,

so often happy to do it like

the day they were born.

Who really gets paid the BIG bucks

to engineer fruit adhesives

with your accent just so?

III. (freewrite by Tanya, selection by Tyler, poem by Elaine)

The flowers were all wall-flowers,

Sugar cubes of want, scattered grain,

Disuse and genteel paranoia,

That barren go-to wasteland:

Esplanades, rivulets, amulets,

Hocus-pocus postulates,

A heart-shaped socketwrench.

O molten lava yellow happiness,

Twirling up like a dervish devil-twister,

Self-satisfied and purple-sleek,

The bluebell of forgetfulness.

We have a bearskin rug and we never shave it!

IV. (freewrite by Kate, selection by Tanya, poem by Tyler)

Abandoned behind the peach,

the sun makes past loves or even current

into warm squash, the core that held the food.

Someone they once knew

made excuses but then forgot,

lolled about, snapped,

dressed a table beside meshy bulbs

and thin crystal with thin green necks,

as if to strip themselves,

snipped by silver,

wrought by a sweating palm.