Zappai Mode!

One of the things I’m noticing more and more with Worku is that zappai may be the form the game produces most naturally.

That makes sense when you look at the material we’re working with. Word games don’t always hand us a carefully curated set of poetic words. It hands us whatever the game coughs up: verbs, nouns, odd adjectives, slang, technical terms, near-rhymes, words that seem to have absolutely no business appearing in the same poem.

Sometimes the constraints arrive and there’s an obvious image waiting inside them. Sometimes they lean toward a human moment or emotional observation. But sometimes you get something like:

ALIGN, RUMOR, BEEFY, TEETH, WEEPS, PEEVE.

At this point I’m scratching my head, scouring the dictionary and thesaurus for meaning and usage, breaking pencil lead, and heaving frustrated sighs.

Zappai, though, gives those unruly words somewhere to go. It can absorb jokes, absurdity, wordplay, exaggeration, pop culture, little narratives, and sheer linguistic mischief without pretending the poem needs to become profound. In Worku, that flexibility matters.

And there’s another reason zappai fits the game so well: sometimes the real achievement is simply making the constraint words belong together.

That sounds like a low bar until you try it.

When the words are especially strange, coherence becomes craft. If five unrelated constraints can be made to sound like they came from the same tiny world, that is already a meaningful success. The poem doesn’t have to reveal the nature of existence. Sometimes getting from RUMOR to BEEFY to TEETH to WEEPS to PEEVE without the whole thing collapsing is the victory. Here’s what I did with it:

ALIGN the RUMOR …
make it BEEFY, with big TEETH —
he WEEPS, my pet PEEVE

That may be one of the pleasures of Worku I like most. The game can begin with randomness, but the poet still has to impose shape. Zappai is especially good at that because it doesn’t resist the weirdness. It uses it. Check out what others did with the random words they got in their poems.

Haiku-like Worku may ask us to discover an image. Senryu-like Worku may ask us to notice something human. Zappai often asks a simpler and stranger question:

Can you make these ridiculous words live together for seventeen syllables?

When the answer is yes, that can be enough.