5-4-3: A lipogram for Oulipost

5-4-3

 

2012:

Pam, my Pam
a.m., p.m.,

bad day? Pam
my Pam-Pam

2013:

$600 a day,
bad FM, a.m., p.m.,
$600 a day, bad
FM, a.m., p.m.-
A jam, a bad day,
Pam-Pam? My bad.
Pam? Pam?
 
2014:
my day: bad
day by day
day by bad bad day
Pam
Pam
Pam
 
Sources (All from today's Houston Chronicle)
Sewing, Joy. "A Beauty Contest for Women ‘on Wheels.’" Houston Chronicle 2 Apr. 2014: E1.
Solomon, Jerome. "Yes, It’s Just One Victory but the Vibe is Different." Houston Chronicle 2 Apr. 2014: C1.

 

Note:
This was a lipogram. Essentially, I can’t use any letter than appears in the title “Houston Chronicle.” As it turns out and is probably glaringly obvious, this means I was limited to one and a half vowels, which didn’t make for a very rich repertoire of words. I include numbers where they appeared in the articles as words. Almost any article would have produced a similar very small list of allowed words, but I couldn’t resist these two articles, which are both very cool in their own right.
 
I should also say that I had a list of words I was planning to build off of, but they simply didn’t appear at all in today’s paper. (baby, payday, were what predominated in my mind. But perhaps I can just send that hypothetical poem to Justin Bieber.)
 
Here is the prompt I was responding to:
 
A lipogram is a text that excludes one or more letters of the alphabet. The ingenuity demanded by the restriction varies in proportion to the frequency of the letter or letters excluded. For this initial exercise, you will compose a poem using only words that can be formed from letters that are NOT found in the title of your newspaper. For example, if you are working with the Washington Post, you must avoid using words that contain the letters A, G, H, I, N, O, P, S, T and W.