Exquisite Corpse
Quick answer: Exquisite corpse is a collaborative game where writers add lines without seeing the whole. Learn its Surrealist origins and how to play it for poems.
Exquisite corpse is a collaborative writing game in which several people build a sentence or poem together, each contributing a part without seeing most of what the others have written. The classic method uses a folded sheet of paper: you write your fragment, fold the page to hide it, and pass it on. When the paper is finally opened, the group reads a text nobody composed and nobody could have, which is precisely the point.
Poets keep the game alive because it manufactures accident. Collaboration plus concealment produces images and collisions that no single taste would permit, and even a silly session tends to yield one line worth stealing for serious work. It is also simply the best icebreaker poetry owns, equally at home in a workshop, a classroom or a kitchen after dinner.
History and the Strange Name
The game emerged among the Surrealists in Paris around 1925, in the circle around Andre Breton, adapted from an old parlour game known in Britain as consequences. Its name comes from the first sentence the group produced, which declared that an exquisite corpse would drink the new wine; the phrase delighted the players enough to christen the whole practice, cadavre exquis in French. The Surrealists treated the results seriously, as collective access to the marvellous, and a drawing version, with one player supplying a head, the next a torso, the next legs, became equally famous among painters such as Yves Tanguy and Joan Miro.
How to Play
The sentence version assigns each player a grammatical slot in a fixed template, commonly adjective, noun, verb, adjective, noun, so the result is always grammatical and always deranged: something like 'the punctual river devours a velvet apology', to invent one. The poem version is looser: each writer adds a full line, sees only the line immediately before, folds the rest away and passes the sheet. Ten minutes and five people reliably produce a twenty-line creature.
Digital play works too, by message thread or shared document with earlier lines hidden, which is how scattered writing groups keep the game going across time zones.
What Poets Get from It
Beyond fun, the game trains two muscles. First, surrender: you cannot control the whole, so you learn to write a strong line that welcomes strangers on either side. Second, harvesting: reading the opened corpse teaches you to spot accidental brilliance, the same skill revision requires. Many writers keep a private file of corpse lines and let them seed solo poems later, with collaborators' blessing.
What poets can take from this
- Fix the template before starting so every contribution lands in a working sentence or stanza.
- Show each player only the previous line; total blindness produces chaos, one line produces music.
- Play fast; deliberation smuggles taste back into a game designed to evade it.
- Read the result aloud immediately, then vote on the three best accidents.
- Ask the group's permission before reusing a line in your own poems, then reuse it.
Try it yourself
Run an exquisite corpse with at least three friends using the line-by-line method for sixteen lines. Afterwards, alone, write a serious poem that keeps exactly two lines from the corpse and builds a new home around them.
Questions
Can you play exquisite corpse alone?
Sort of. Write single lines on cards over several days, so your own memory becomes the fold, then shuffle and combine. It lacks the shock of other minds but still generates collisions your planning self would veto.
What is the difference between exquisite corpse and a collaborative poem?
In ordinary collaboration, writers see and shape the whole text together. Exquisite corpse deliberately hides the whole from every contributor, making concealment part of the method. The blindness, not the teamwork, is what defines it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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