Sartre Kitchen-Stabbing Poetry
This is a new game I just came up with. First let me explain what inspired it: my husband and I came across a French movie on TV and started watching. It starred Isabelle Huppert, which is shorthand for "it involved blood-curdling extremes of existential coldness, and sex so affectless it verged on psychopathic." With the help of Google I figured out what movie it was: "Ma Mere," whose plot summary is as follows: "When his father dies, a young man is introduced by his attractive, amoral mother to a world of hedonism and depravity." Meanwhile my husband asks, "Are all her movies like this?"
So I click on various movie titles listed under her name on imdb.com, which, for each movie listed, includes a blurb summarizing the plot and a list of keywords. Here are some randomly chosen plot synopses and keywords from movies she's made within the last ten years (I am not making this up):
Blood / Young Boy / Actual Animal Killed / Letter / Grave
A prostitute and her teenager daughter, will have to run away after the girl stabs her mother's pimp.
Self Hate / BDSM / Pianist /Female Musician / Self Inflicted Injury
Great movie about coldness and distance in human relationships!
Switzerland / Chocolate / Car Accident / Attempted Murder / Sleeping Pill
Idiosyncratic, infuriating non-linear autobiographical fantasia
Male Nudity / Gag / Female Nudity / Femdom / Urination
Fashion executive Dominique's obsession for Quentin, a young bisexual hustler, fills her desire for physical love but leaves her taxed emotionally
Nephew / Corruption / Gloves / Sabotage / Suicide Attempt
So here's the game: pretend you have a set of poetry magnets featuring keywords or words used in plot summaries of Isabelle Huppert movies, as described on imdb.com. Now write poetry using nothing but those words (and, if needed, link words like the, to, and, etc.). It's amazing! Anything you write this way will end up sounding like Sartre wrote it while stabbing himself to death in some grimy, fluorescent-lit kitchen!
A great game for parties and road trips, I think.
posted by Daleth Hall @ 10:08 PM
3 Comments:
A young man romantically pursues his masochistic piano teacher.
She's on her own search for seemingly unattainable sexual pleasure.
Beautiful and aloof, she has forebodings of disaster,
Hidden by a false happiness.
Sperm makes him question the very worth of his humanity;
He turns into a machiavellian exterminating angel,
Rapes and eventually kills two dozen defenseless shepherds and farm servants of both sexes.
A world of sexual exploitation, exhibitionism, and wildness.
Dang, Brian, you didn't write poetry, you wrote flash fiction! You wrote a short-short! Who knew this game would work for prose, too!
Sorry! I could've sworn I was writing a poem....
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