a cardinal number, ten times three
a negative used to express
denial
or refusal:
acting
as a single unit
used
to indicate duty, propriety.
to
possess a distressing emotion
aroused
by impending evil, pain,
etc.;
that people in general
(about,
or going to)-
roused
from sleep toward a more
elevated
position;
and,
to come upon by chance
(at
that point in an action, speech,
etc.):
a second person, singular.
of
be; a set of this many persons
or
things: an unjust exertion,
division
of the species,
coitus!!!:
to irritate, annoy or cause
resentful
displeasure, vigorous,
immediately
following-
in
time- movable, usually solid…
Source
(a sentence, within)
Ward,
Mike & Hassan, Anita. "Neighbors Outraged Over Sex-Offender Home.’"
Houston Chronicle 3 Apr. 2014: A1.
Note:
I
kind of enjoyed this, and this will likely require multiple readings if making
sense is a thing you want in what you read. I started with a single, albeit long
sentence, which is also a quote within the article. (I had planned on starting
with a very short sentence and then letting things flower more fully, but this
sentence leaped out at me on the front page and I couldn’t really resist seeing
what it would become).
In
essence, I kept the definition of each word, or rather I selected definitions of
the word and then trimmed some non-essentials, while keeping the definitions
from the online dictionary intact, albeit trimmed. I *did* play around quite a
bit with punctuation and spacing. This definitely embodies the notion that you
don’t stop revising, you just eventually give up.
The
sentence I started with was “No one should have to fear they will wake up and
find 23 violent sex offenders living next door.” The article itself began with
the phrase “Thirty sex offenders…” I liked the definition for thirty, so used
it as the title of the poem.
The
poem seemed to move from the particular and likely idiosyncratic to what may be
a much more common description of human interaction and life.
Here
is the prompt I was responding to:
Select a single sentence from a
newspaper article. Replace each meaningful word in the text [verb, noun,
adjective, adverb] by its dictionary definition. Repeat this treatment on
the resulting sentence, and so on, until you’ve had enough! Note that
after only two such treatments with a relatively compact dictionary, even
a two-word sentence can produce an accumulation of 57 words.
