Definitional poetry: a cardinal number, ten times three

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.