To celebrate the final day of National Poetry Month, a few of us got together on Facebook to create an Exquisite Corpse. In case you don’t know, an Exquisite Corpse is a collectively assembled poem.

Each contributor added to the composition in sequence by following a pattern rule. There are other ways to do it, but for this we followed a “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun” pattern.

Example of a line: “The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.”

Here is the result, a poem written by a virtual village. I added the words in italics to connect  the lines. Thank you to everyone who participated. I want to try this again soon.

Universe Calling

The brilliant night quietly called the lost galaxy
while the wistful question endlessly spinning the infinite realms
and the mournful wind longingly cried the broken mantra.

The faint spark sullenly echoed the long-dead reply
as the eldritch chasm eerily awaited the falling angel.
The doleful flight yawningly dreams the green moon
and the pulsating quasars luminescently spiral the depthless void.

—Written by (in order of line) Angela Yuriko Smith, A.F. Stewart, Devon Lewis,
Robin Wiesneth, Ashley Dioses, John Reinhart and R.A. Smith

By Angela Yuriko Smith

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Shimanchu-American and award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years of experience as a professional writer in nonfiction. Publisher of Space & Time magazine (est. 1966), producer of the Exercise Your Writes YouTube podcast, two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and HWA Mentor of the Year for 2020, find her at angelaysmith.com.

21 thoughts on “Exquisite Corpse: Collaborative Poem”
  1. Brilliant and fun, Angela! I’ve participated in several of these myself. We didn’t know what the others added until it was complete and read aloud. Is this the way you did it? By email?

    1. No, we just did it as comments on Facebook. Everyone could see what was written before, hence the common topic. I had so much fun with this I’d love to do more, and I think not knowing what anyone else wrote would be better. Maybe we could all do it through LoH one month?

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