5 Oulipo Constraints
Oulipo, or Workshop of Potential Literature, is a group of writers and thinkers interested in the notion of “constraint”. You can think of constraint as something like the rules of a game. For example, the rules of the sonnet game result in the creation of a sonnet. The rules of the short story game result in the creation of a short story. Are there other rules? New games? New things to create? By asking those questions, the Oulipo has become a workshop of potential literature.
Here are five constraints you can try. For example, the metro poem: “A metro poem has as many verses as your trip has stations, minus one.”
I do what I call observation exercise poems. These always begin with immediate impressions and then progress from there, finding different structures for each exercise. The most elaborate was an exercise that became a kind of urban circuitous pilgrimage. I went to six different locations, beginning in my own room (private space), and from there by stages into public, commercial and finally civic space (Philadelphia City Hall.) In each location I took brief notes of first impressions—whatever most seized my attention. At the end of the day, I wrote another corresponding ‘stanza’ of free associations, recollections: a pair for each ‘station.’ In the end, I had 42 pairs, 84 ‘stanzas,’ printed out and taped together as a single, 16 page scroll.
I repeated this, the same locations, every day for 7 days, reading aloud from a scroll at each site what I’d written for that location on the previous days. I read this last week at a Fringe performance with accompanying photographs by Valerie Matthews Logan projected on a screen as I read. Takes 22 minutes to read. I’d like to do more with the multimedia dimension—taking the poem out of its textual frame… perhaps adding ambient sounds to the visuals.
I also wrote a poem—like the transit stop exercise you describe—this was one of CA Conrad’s Soma(tic) exercises. Nine stops on the Broad Street Subway. Sit in a center seat in center car. Observe carefully. Eat some dark chocolate. Close your eyes and make a subaural hum—so only you can hear. As soon as the train stops, open your eyes and write the first 9 words that come to mind. Repeat for 9 stops. Leave the subway, find a bench or grassy place to sit, take notes, lots of notes, for each set of 9 words. Then write a poem from the notes. As Conrad says—you have been under the earth, you have come out into light of day—the poem will be there!
This will be published in Apiary this fall.
I also do what I call ‘riffs on words.’ I write a list of words, free association, than circle a predetermined number of those words as they claim my attention—and for each one, write a prose poem stream of consciousness, keeping that word in mind the whole time but trying NOT to write directly about it—resisting that as much as possible, but not to the point of making it a hard and fast rule. Neat to see how they tend to link together.
Jacob,
Thanks for sharing your constraints with us. If anybody has others, we’d love to hear them, too.
[...] which he was a participant, the OuLiPoLooZa. I’m familiar with the experimental French poetry Oulipo, a form of poetry that involves the use of constraints, and now realize it is alive and well and [...]