A
Dadaist
creative exercise which works in a few ways. The exquisite corpse
poem is either created by random word selection (such as drawing words out of a
hat or blindly stabbing at words on flipped dictionary pages) or by passing a paper around in a circle and having everyone add a word to the poem without looking at the prior text. The first poem generated by this means read: "The Exquisite Corpse shall feast on the new wine"
(Well, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau") and the name stuck.
Exquisite corpse drawings are created in a similar manner, but with pictures instead of text - often depicting a human figure divided up into head, torso, legs, and feet each by a different artist and in a different style.