The Romanian-born poet Paul Celan once wrote a series of surrealist questions and answers. Here are a couple of examples:
What is forgetting?
An unripe apple stabbed by a spear.
What is a tear?
A scale awaiting a weight.
Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list. Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (I used the 6 bolded words)
owl
generator
fog
river
clove
miracle
cyclops
oyster
mercurial
seaweed
gutter
artillery
salt
elusive
thunder
ghost
acorn
cheese
longing
cowbird
truffle
quahog
song
Now for each question, write a one-line answer. Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic. These are surrealist answers, after all!
After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.
et voila…
outer cold
exceeds my inner heat;
I never know what shape to take.
It’s me.
something from a Hemingway novel…
The mold is magic to my tongue.
When the scale of earthbound urges
tilts to the sky,
Lagging waves
can never hope to catch
the light.
defying atrophy 