#holorhyme — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #holorhyme, aggregated by home.social.
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You Wouldn’t Steal A Poem
Have you ever wanted to steal the way something sounds? Have you ever wanted to take something you just heard someone say but twist it to your bizarre whims? Good news! Maybe you can live out that fantasy without actually committing a thoughtcrime (or a real crime). The holorhyme constraint is a tool for creating experimental poetry.
The Writing Prompt
The goal of the exercise is to take an existing piece of text and write a new one based entirely on rhyming words. This could even be adapted to the particular dialect, affectation, or speed at which someone talks (and how you heard it). I’ve even seen this used as a type of satire to borrow the rhythm and texture of a well-known speech or dramatic monologue and make a total mockery of it. Use with caution.
Think of this writing constraint as a sort of game of telephone, or (to put it more elegantly) material impressionism. The goal is to take the way something sounds like to you when read aloud, and then twist that impression into something new. A fun variation of this exercise is to record yourself reading something, run it through a crappy piece of transcription software, and then see what comes out. YouTube used to be an excellent resource for making experimental poetry using this method. It may still be, but I’ve not checked up on it for a while.
Example Poem
The example below is a quick little poem I made when reading the English alphabet forwards, then backward. It is also a rough approximation of what 2000s-era AI chatbots sounded like when they talked to each other.
ABC...CBAA bee: seedy effigy.Age, hide, shake rays,an elemental pea—cures. Tea you feedouble-true as eggs—wisely.See why exits wobble you.Be you to us our que? Peonies, in the mail: Cage-A.I ate Shea, Jeffie, and deceived—Be “Yay!”In order to really get a good sense for how this constraint works, I encourage you to read this or your own poem out loud. You will know you’re getting it right when a person in the next room could have sworn you were saying something else altogether.
https://abmurrow.com/writing-prompts/experimental-poetry-holorhyme/
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