How to fit over a thousand poems on a single sheet of paper
This was an activity I created for G4G15, but feel free to modify it however you like.
It’s a booklet containing a set of limericks celebrating puzzles. Each follows the traditional AABBA limerick rhyme scheme. But in addition, I’ve carefully designed them so that corresponding lines across the poems rhyme as well – a three-dimensional rhyme scheme! You can make new poems by picking any of the first lines, followed by any of the second lines, and so on.
The inner pages of the booklet are made from a single sheet of paper, folded and cut (but not cut all the way through, so it always remains a single sheet). There are three poems printed on the sheet, and these become three pages. With the poems provided, that’s three choices for each line. However, there’s a blank fourth page. Your challenge is to compose a fourth limerick to fit in with the first three. Once you’ve done that, there will be four choices for each line, giving a colossal 4×4×4×4×4=1,024 poems contained in this little book!
I also provided a cover sheet with a title and some additional explanation. Fitting over a thousand limericks onto a single sheet of paper is pretty impressive. But that’s nothing compared to the French writer Raymond Queneau’s 1961 book Cent mille milliards de poèmes. He did what we’ve done here, except with ten sonnets of fourteen lines. That gives a possible 1014, or 100 trillion, poems.