Quadratic Engine

This is a poetry engine (a formal prompt) that uses the quadratic formula as a poetic form, the way you might use a sonnet, a haiku, or a villanelle.

These instructions provide the formal premise for your poems. The script runs in your BRAIN. (You write the poems.)

You do not need to know any math to use the engine. (And you do not need to know how to drive.)

I use the quadratic formula to create poems suffused with with a certain melancholy equivocation, and I thought you might like to do that too. This is one of my favorite processes for rapidly producing a poem draft with evocative formal and emotional relationships.

(Formal poem-generation processes (such as N+1) are often called "engines" of experimental poetry.)