The 100 word poem

The 100 word (or less) stories

Stories need to include these words: timesdeal, beauty, travel, fitness, discount, shopping

Story 01 

Title: The shopper and her trainer!

‘I’ve a great deal from time,’ he began.

‘It is Timesdeal, dear,’ she corrected.

He told her he was her biggest fan

But her fitness with words was bad, man!

‘Great deals from time,’ he began again,

And went on this time without a pause,

‘Come to the wary, aware. The pain

Of not knowing is worse than disdain

On the faces of those who have gained!’

‘That’s why I go shopping, even travel

Far, and every discount I unravel!’

She replied. ‘Under me you have trained,’

He said with pride, ‘and both of us gained!’

(A 100-word story in rhyme.)

Story 02 

Title: Intrigue for 702

I walked into the lift lobby. Saw a constable waiting there. Crime, I thought.

The lift came. We entered. I asked, ‘Which floor?’

‘Seventh.’

My floor! ‘Where?’

‘702.’

My flat number! This is intriguing!

‘What has happened?’

‘This courier boy came to the thana seeking help.’

‘Package says ‘702, Near Paharganj Police Station’, said another person in the lift. He was the delivery boy.

Ah! Must be the fitness, shopping, beauty, and travel discount vouchers I had ordered from Timesdeal. I must’ve forgotten to give my complete address.

I received the package and thanked the constable for his inspired action!

Story 03

Title: A thought on friendship

Priyanka told me she was dreaming of going to Prague if she wins that travel trip on the Timesdeal contest.

‘Nice dream,’ I said, ‘and if you win, gift me those beauty, fitness, and shopping discount vouchers that you were talking about.’

She nodded and smiled.

I too nodded and smiled.

We went our way, both thinking the same thought: ‘Does this really happen… ever?’

Surprisingly, the next thought too was the same for both: ‘The competition is severe. I must write another story now!’

They say friends are the best sparring partners!

Story 04 

Title: The conversation before they stepped out together

Just one rain and it was lush green everywhere. So were the envious glances when Pips and Monk stepped outside. Monk had just indulged in an expensive beauty treatment… and no, it wasn’t one with any discount attached.

‘Now I’m ready for shopping,’ Monk mumbled.

Pips immediately protested, ‘I have my fitness classes. Can’t come with you.’

‘Going alone is like a travel through hell,’ said Monk, ‘why can’t timesdeal mail me a shopping partner?’

Pips looked alarmed on hearing this and hurriedly said, ‘Fitness later. Come, let’s go!’

Arvind Passey
20 July 2012

Top reviews from other countries

The line between a prose poem and a story is often a thin one, perhaps not discernible at all. Poet Joel Brouwer’s 100-word prose poems in Centuries, a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book in 2003, reside on that thin line.

He adheres to a definition of the prose poem as “a piece of writing that deploys every tactic of poetry with the single exception of the line break,” which means that lyrical novels such as The Waves could be classified as a prose poem and a novel (gosh, novel as prose poem?).

Whether Brouwer’s centuries are poems or stories really doesn’t matter, though. As Andrei Codrescu put it, they “work as missiles, pastries, or treasure chests.” We sat down with Brouwer (virtually) to find out more.

Why did you decide to place the constraint of 100 words on your poems in Centuries?
There are so many prose poems and pieces of short poetic prose that I love. Stein, Calvino, Michaux, Cortazar, Kafka . . . I could go on. I wanted to try the form out, but the lack of boundaries intimidated me. I was accustomed to working in lines. I like a narrow bed. I needed some kind of limit, and 100 words seemed like a good possibility. I wrote a few, found the process both fun and irritating (always a wonderful combination), and kept going.

Do you think your 100 word poems speak more to the box they’re contained within or to what’s beyond the box?
I think some are quite aware of their box and others try to gesture outside it. Some seem to me very dense and coiled, self-conscious, inward. Others are airier, more allusive, expansive.

Some of your poems seem are very narrative, like stories, while others seem to be very much prose poems. How do you think of them?
I don’t! Well, OK, in seriousness, I think they’re poems. In Michael Benedikt’s crucial 1976 anthology, The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, he said in the introduction something like, a prose poem is a piece of writing that deploys every tactic of poetry with the single exception of the line break. That’s always seemed to me an excellent definition. As long as the author is cognizant of everything a poet is cognizant of—sound, rhythm, image, tone, metaphor, allusion, etc.—then the thing’s a poem, even if it’s not in lines. Incidentally, this metric suggests that any number of works generally considered prose are in fact poems. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is a nice example.

What was your writing process with the 100-word form? Did you count your words while you wrote, or did you write a piece and then edit toward 100 words?
There were several different models. Some would start with a single sentence and accrue. Others would begin as several hundred words and be chiseled down. Plus myriad variations in between. It was most fun when the piece got to be maybe 10 words over or under the limit. Then you go through the poem interrogating every word: Do you deserve to be here? Are you pulling your weight? Are you crucial? Because if I can cut you, I can buy myself an adjective. Cutting pronouns, prepositions, articles, and replacing them with nouns and verbs . . . there is perhaps no greater joy.

Do you write with such containment in mind now? How has writing 100-word pieces informed your other writing, whether it’s an essay or a poem?
I don’t write in forms this circumscribed at the moment, but I do have certain idiosyncratic tricks I use to try to keep my writing free of fat. I think working on Centuries taught me the value and pleasure of compression. I won’t forget that lesson.

For more, read four of Brouwer’s 100-word stories featured in this issue of 100 Word Story. They were originally published in Centuries, put out by Four Way Books.

Brouwer is also the author of several other collections of poetry, including And So (2009) and Exactly What Happened (1999), winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University. He has also published several chapbooks.

Photo credit: Joel Brouwer