Answers

Today’s prompt is based on the ‘surrealist’ questions/answers by Paul Celan, for exmple:

What is forgetting?
        An unripe apple stabbed by a spear.

What is a tear?
        A scale awaiting a weight.

Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list. Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (e.g., what is seaweed?) owl

generator

fog

river

clove

miracle

cyclops

oyster

mercurial

seaweed

gutter

artillery

salt

elusive

thunder

ghost

acorn

cheese

longing

cowbird

truffle

quahog

song

Now for each question, write a one-line answer. Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic. These are surrealist answers, after all!

After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.

My attempt (words - fog, river, oyster, truffle, song):

The river's source soaked the map book
With echoes like snapping twigs at cave's end
Three fermenting clumps emerging from the soil
Were swallowed whole by waves of rolling sandstone
Arising from the collective buzzing 
of insects in the early morning.