Oulipost #22: Antonymy

Tourists compliment welcome before the coming depression

Egotistic indulgers assembled the spirit of Western tourists who weren’t exhumed out of the most invigorating miracle to compliment the extreme depression, a prosperity that hasn’t repressed silence against declining approvals by the West’s diverse vacationing individualists. A tourist’s welcome couldn’t trivially appease the depression descending occasion, which isn’t insignificant to the avocation of an individual Western sightseer or customer. Unremarkable in spite of their declining incompetence or below-level lethargy, Western tourists withhold unlike followers or recipients against deep-sea depression-descending delays. In contrast, they avoid a harmless sky, tearing down a fray or disorder to destroy a difficult roadblock opposed by defaulting marketers. At most 31 Westerners were born when a stream of water tightly adhered against a depression or prevented a dam that mended around an individual drone dropping an abstraction. Thirty Westerners found outside Monday’s tranquility are no doubt alive.

An oft-occuring  composure departs before brief existences

An amateur techno character frequently hiding castigates her de-contextualization on Tuesday without “brief timelessness … frequent no shows,” mild departures from irresponsibilities before the seventy‐day presence. A concluding outsider resigns solo artists from few erasures excluding “A Rush of Days,” which wasn’t last concealed off a frequent ambiguity’s 1973 single “New Individuals.” While the dissonance hits a deflating blockage of lagging concealers, born of a heart flutter in 1996, its death‐off‐the‐rough hateful truths shies away from subtracted exteriority 14 days earlier. Girl Talk takes its muteness from the auto tune silence logged calm, which it eventually erased, only not in a opposition to a gay New York  boy. A complication not here isn’t sadder than a derivative nor impedes an imperfect partitioning of its gloomy silence without a discord of frequently absent mufflers Its first disappearance, a big California slump, loses an individual from her downbeat worst other than when she topples a big sour apathetic pause through its balanced upright bass. From techno or death metal, haters’ brief endings … frequent  displacements do not require optional indifferences.

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Poems were constructed from:

Gubrubacharya, Binaj.“Sherpas threaten boycott after Everest deaths.” Associated Press as reprinted in Seattle Times 22 April 2014 Print Replica. A1.

Wilson, Owen R. “The Seldom Scene Returns After Long Absence.” Seattle Times 22 April 2014 Print Replica. B3.

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Note on composition and process:

These two poems were experiments with the Oulipean method, antonymy, in which as the name alludes, every significant word is replaced with its antonym or opposite. The objective here was to take an articler in the April 22 edition of the local paper and perform such an androgynous swap. Check out the full prompt and read other poets’ attempts at this exercise at the Found Poetry Review blog.

For this exercise, I pulled down the full text of about 20 articles from the Seattle times, narrowed that down to about 8, and finally worked on these two: a news report of a Sherpa boycott and an album review. I just went word for word, plugging each term into Thesaurus.com and picking one of the antonyms listed. At times, I had to wade through the synonyms of word, like for the word “avalanche”,  to find one that actually had antonyms listed. I also had to be creative with proper nouns like “Sherpas” and “Mt. Everest,” as these had no direct antonyms. I opted to treat them as symbols and /or generic objects instead. For some words I had to swap the part of speech from noun to verb and vice versa in order to find an opposite. I also tried to replace definite articles with indefinite ones and singular nouns with plural nouns as well. I had a lot of fun with this method. It’s pretty quick and easy to perform, and the results are quite astounding. I guess this makes sense, given that the method performs a kind of negative dialectic, disrupting the objectivity of the journalistic prose. I’m sure I’ll come back next month to finish the other 6 or so articles I didn’t get to. I’m curious to see what this will do to the advice column, or an already severely abstract text like the horoscope. Not only timelessness won’t be silent.