(EDITOR’S NOTE: Our staff writers are a fun bunch of students who like to experiment with collaborative writing. The “exquisite corpse” is a writing game developed by young members of the Surrealist art movement in Paris during the 1920s. The Surrealists developed many different rules around this game to allow poetry or fiction or drawings to be created “unconsciously” by a group of participants. In the example presented below, each staff member was asked to write one line of a poem without seeing the previous line. We did this by telling each writer to contribute a phrase containing a different part of speech, after which they would fold the page to hide what they wrote from the next writer. This was the sequence of lines : 1. A subject/ noun, 2. A verb, 3. An object/ noun 4. Another verb, 5. A descriptive phrase, defining clause, or causal phrase, 6. Another direct object/ noun. Below is the surprising result!)
A Six Line Exquisite Corpse
“The Oscar winner
ran for
The President of the United States
that carelessly killed his grandmother
because the delayed #4 train was full
with the purple coat.”