Poetry Myriorama

FEATURES 06/20

A ‘myriorama’ originally referred to a nineteenth century set of illustrated cards for children which could be reordered to create a myriad of different images. Inspire Arts worked with local artists and schoolchildren to create a Myriorama for Nottinghamshire, made of woodcut panels, which toured library galleries in 2017/18 (see illustration above).

French novelist, poet, critic and editor Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) dallied with Surrealism and enjoyed playing with poetic form. He created a piece which translates as AHundred Thousand Billion Poems consisting of ten sonnets whose 140 lines could be read in any order, thus creating a myriad new poems.

On 15 July 2017, as part of Inspire Poetry Festival, award-winning Nottingham poet Matthew Welton combined these two notions and led an innovative workshop at Southwell Library which resulted in the creation of a collaborative poem that could be read in one hundred million different ways. Working together, his group produced ten poems, each made up of eight lines,which could be ordered and re-ordered to create a multitude of different poems.

The results were published in a bound, laminated A4 book (copies are available to view, but not borrow, in Inspire libraries). Each line of the poems produced is printed on an individual strip, enabling the reader to explore the many different possible poems contained within these eighty lines.

If you would like to try creating a 'poetry myriorama' with your own writing group, see below for an outline how to go about it. You could also look at an online random poem generator inspired by Queneau's work.

Full workshop guidance and explanatory notes for creative writing tutors, prepared by Julia Bird and Matthew, are available from Inspire. Please email the Reading team and we will be happy to send the notes out to you by email.

Workshop leader notes on creating a Poetry Myriorama

This can be done as a quick preparatory exercise to kick off a writing workshop or as a longer, more focussed session in its own right.

Explain a little bit about Raymond Queneau and his 100,000,000,000,000 Poems project

If you have time, hand round examples from previous iterations of the game, read and discuss.

Ask participants to write 1-10 down the left hand margin of their page, then write 10 individual lines of poetry

Lines should be about 10 syllables long (or 5 stresses / iambic pentameter)

Include sensory information – smells, sights, sounds etc

When all lines are written, the tutor creates as many 10 line poems as there are time for by calling for lines 1-10 from individual participants in a random order.