You Wouldn’t Steal A Poem#
Have you ever wanted to steal the way something sounds? Have you ever wanted to take something you just heard someone say but twist it to your bizarre whims? Good news! Maybe you can live out that fantasy without actually committing a thoughtcrime (or a real crime). The holorhyme constraint is a tool for creating experimental poetry. The goal is to pay attention to the way a poem or a piece of writing sounds when it is read aloud and copy it syllable for syllable without copying many (if any) of the actual words. At the end of this writing exercise, you should be able to read your two poems side-by-side and have a hard time telling them apart. The text itself, however, will give away the trick in this unique writing constraint.
The Writing Prompt#
The goal of the exercise is to take an existing piece of text and write a new one based entirely on rhyming words. It should be a phonetically identical work. That is to say, a holorhyme is a poem that sounds almost exactly like the source work, but with different words, punctuation, and line breaks. This could even be adapted to the particular dialect, affectation, or speed at which someone talks (and how you heard it). I’ve even seen this used as a type of satire to borrow the rhythm and texture of a well-known speech or dramatic monologue and make a total mockery of it. Use with caution.
Think of this writing constraint as a sort of game of telephone, or (to put it more elegantly) material impressionism. The goal is to take the way something sounds like to you when read aloud, and then twist that impression into something new. A fun variation of this exercise is to record yourself reading something, run it through a crappy piece of transcription software, and then see what comes out. YouTube used to be an excellent resource for making experimental poetry using this method. It may still be, but I’ve not checked up on it for a while.
Why Would You Write Like This?#
What I like about holorhyme poems is that they are another way to pay homage to a piece of writing while still creating something new and unique. Possible uses for holorhyme include:
- Drafting a response to a poem that spoke to you
- Creating a mockery of a poem you didn’t like so much
- Creating a series of poems all based off of what a single poem sounded like
- Writing a poem based off of the way a certain orator’s dialect made the poem sound
- Writing a poem in your native tongue using a piece of writing from a foreign language
- Capturing some of the sounds and rhythms you like from one of your favorite pieces of writing
- Sneaking a snatch of dialogue from non-poetic works, speeches, or even you favorite movie into your poetry
Example Holorhyme Poem#
The example below is a quick little poem I made when reading the English alphabet forwards, then backward. It is also a rough approximation of what 2000s-era AI chatbots sounded like when they talked to each other.
ABC…CBA
A bee: seedy effigy. Age, hide, shake rays, an elemental pea— cures. Tea you fee double-true as eggs— wisely.
See why exits wobble you. Be you to us our que? Peonies, in the mail: Cage-A. I ate Shea, Jeffie, and deceived— Be “Yay!”
In order to really get a good sense for how this constraint works, I encourage you to read this or your own poem out loud. You will know you’re getting it right when a person in the next room could have sworn you were saying something else altogether.
