I’m still sorting through old poems and that work has churned up some fun pieces, including the one listed below.
I think this originated as a class assignment for a writing constraint called “snowballing” or just “a snowball poem”. The writing system is pretty straightforward.
- Each line contains a single word
- The next line contains either one more or one less letter than the previous
Eventually, you will end up with a triangle shaped poem that either grows or shrinks in width. You could always do something fun by going up to a line with, say, 10 letters, then work you way back down to 1. However, I was focused on making the biggest snowball in existence, and I feel like I got pretty close to the limit.
I must have had a lot of free time on my hands because I ended up writing a 20 liner about a bisexual two-toed sloth hanging out with con artists deep in discussion about matters of national (and psychic) security.
A
bi
two
toed
sloth
walked
amongst
hellbent
hucksters
flagrantly
masticating
mockingbirds
imaginatively
deconstructing
paraprosdokians
conversationally
intellectualizing
ultranationalistic
counterintelligence
pseudohallucinations
Full disclosure, I did use a word-finding tool to help me get words of the appropriate length and type to keep the snowball growing. That said, I’m not sure how much longer I could have gone on.
Is this the biggest snowball poem out there? If you have a longer snowball poem, I’d love to see it and compare notes.
