Cadavre Exquis

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When you are the featured poet at a reading, it is good manners to show up on time. I was scheduled to feature at the Little 5 Poetry bash, but the traffic had other plans. I got to Java Lords at 1832, got a cup of coffee, and went into the lobby of 7 Stages theater. It was empty. I sat down, and took a notebook out of my backpack. As I was looking for an inkpen, Rosser Shymanski walked in, wearing a lovely pair of lime green shoes. The event was outside on the patio.
Han Vance, the primary perpetrator of the event, was on the microphone. “Tomorrow is my first UNNIVERSARY, would-be 13th wedding anniversary so I’m gonna do a special set before you go.” It was an emotional evening for Mr. Vance, but he pulled through. There were only two more poets reading, Mitchell Padgett and Mark LaFountain.
After a while, Rosser pulled some clipboards out of a box, and introduced a parlor game. Each person would start a group poem. You write two lines. Fold the paper over the first line, and pass the clipboard on to the next person. They write two lines, hide the first one, and pass it on to the next person. When you fill up the page, you have a poem.
“Cadavre exquis is similar to the old parlour game consequences – in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold to conceal what they have written, and pass it on to the next player – but adapted so that parts of the body are drawn instead.
It was invented in 1925 in Paris by the surrealists Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, and Marcel Duchamp. The name ‘cadavre exquis’ was derived from a phrase that resulted when they first played the game, ‘le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau’ (‘the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine’).”
Some killjoy observed that stream of consciousness is more fun to write than it is to read … and don’t even think about editing. There is a discussion to be had whether consequences, with or without truth, should be chosen before an exquisite corpse.

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