Lemon These Throats

Posted bywordsandcoffee1Posted inPoetry, W3 Prompts, WritingTags:, , , , , , , , , 
Sliding beyond the brow,
the bend of where noise began.
We lemon these throats behind us,
whispered under night’s edge.
We focused on the impossible,
bravely kicking up the dust
until we become invisible.
We scoured our hells,
but they couldn’t make runway
for the undergrowth.
How many more days will we spend,
leaderless, hovering between 
two sighs of a crusted coincidence,
its literature deemed perilous?

I wrote this poem for the Wea’ve Written Weekly prompt #163, provided by Kim. This week’s prompt contained a few parts; here’s the gist of it:

First, write a poem full of images, things – perhaps a descriptive poem. You can use any form or no form.  My hint is, make sure there are lots of nouns in your poem, ready for part 2!

Second, you are going to play with your poem using a simple poetic technique from the 1960s.

Once you have written your poem, look again at the words you have used. Many of us use the same “word hoard” again and again in our poems, without realizing it. Sooo – in a spirit of play and exploration, I give you the N+7 Machine.

http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/

Go to this website and enter the text of your poem and it will gift you your poem back, but with 14 different versions. It does so via a dictionary and it simply replaces the nouns with another one a bit further on in the dictionary. No AI involved.

After you submit your text, scroll down and you will see 15 versions of your poem.

Now, you could use one of these whole, or you can take phrases or words from several versions and use them in your original poem to strengthen it. Or maybe one of those altered poems will inspire you to write another completely different poem.

I ended up switching out some of the words of my original poem based on my favorite version from the machine. This prompt was great fun! It also churns out some hilarious replacement nouns. Here is my favorite three-line replacement:

“We scoured our hoard
But they couldn’t make rum
For the typewriter.“

I didn’t go with that one, but you can probably see where the idea appears, with alternate nouns, in the poem above.

I decided to title this poem using my favorite line from the replacement generator: “lemon these throats”, a phrase that amazingly made sense and brought a more impactful metaphor to mind than my original.

For others who gave this week’s prompt a try, what were your most surprising, unique, or humorous lines?

17 thoughts on “Lemon These Throats”

  1. Sarah – what an absolutely fascinating piece of work! I’m genuinely impressed by how you’ve embraced this experimental process and crafted something so hauntingly beautiful from it. The phrase “We lemon these throats” stopped me in my tracks – it’s such an unexpected and evocative image that somehow makes perfect emotional sense even while defying literal logic.Your instinct for selecting and combining pieces from the N+7 versions shows real poetic intuition. The way you’ve maintained a coherent emotional journey while preserving the surreal, almost mystical quality of the transformed language is remarkable. Lines like “hovering between / two sighs of a crusted coincidence” are pure poetry – they capture that feeling of being suspended in uncertainty with such vivid, original imagery.What I love most is how you’ve allowed the process to take you somewhere completely unexpected while still maintaining your voice as a poet. The collective “we” throughout gives the piece such power, making it feel like a shared meditation on existence itself. You’ve created something that feels both deeply personal and universally human.This kind of experimental work takes real courage and creativity. Thank you for sharing both the process and the beautiful result!

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    1. Thank you so much for your kind words! This was a fascinating process. I don’t experiment much with these generators or other tools, but I like what you’ve said about being able to use our poetic intuition to combine the best of those pieces along with the best from our own writing to make something both unexpected and powerful.

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  2. Sarah I found that most of the versions didn’t make much sense but I liked the lines:
    “Quaint Alpine chefs I adore/Hobnob with foreign diplomats/Dance with strange manservants in bracken hedges”

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    1. Agreed! I had some goofy, nonsensical lines, too, from the generator. I don’t think I really dove as much into the noun element of the prompt; I’m sure the more nouns I presented, the more bizarre some of the results could have been.

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  3. Crusted coincidence is genius! I didn’t keep my N+7–maybe it was my poem but I don’t recall anything that made me laugh. I did use some of its suggested words, which led to other changes in the poem though. (K)

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    1. Nice! I also didn’t find enough that I liked in any one version of the N+7 generator, but I pulled suggestions in from a few of them and it helped me revise a couple other lines from my original poem. It was an interesting process.

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  4. The N+7 did throw up some interesting phrases. I love the title of your poem and the following lines are too good “How many more days will we spend,leaderless, hovering between two sighs of a crusted coincidence!”

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  6. Pingback: Lemon These Throats – Health is Wealth

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