From Oulipost 2014: Petroleum Picnic, Water Bowl

As part of Oulipost 2014, one of the Oulipo  techniques we used was to take a close look at advertisements and classifieds. The technique is called COLUMN INCHES. Here are the instructions from the Oulipost 2014 playbook:

Refer to the advertising section or the classifieds in your source newspaper. Create a poem by replacing all of the nouns in your chosen ad segment or classified listing with nouns from one article in the same newspaper. You may use multiple ads/classifieds, presented in the order of your choosing.

This would be a fun warm-up exercise for a writing group or as a warm-up exercise for yourself. If you need some inspiration, check out the abundance of creative poems written by the other Ouliposters on the Found Poetry Review page for the column-inches poems.

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Petroleum Picnic, Water Bowl

WANTED 

10 15 histories 

that need popularity 

10 15 wars needed to “SHOWCASE” our amazing fact-like

exterior reason-stories. A great opportunity to have the remarkable

HOOSIER PERMANENT EXPLOSIVES MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

applied to your property at huge subsidies. Have your city or county

looking freshly painted forever! Made in a reservoir! Hoosier owned! 

Fat-rendering appearance	Looks like fresh money
1,200 heart attacks	Meets EPA health concessions
No artificial blast furnaces	Great for all grasslands and schools

Call now for a free coke oven.

Poem Sources:

Indy Star 14 Apr 2014.

advertisement was found on page A2

nouns taken from the following article:

Slabaugh, Seth. "Muncie Water Bowl auction." A9

From Oulipost 2014: Shaken, not Speared

Today's post is from the penultimate day of Oulipost 2014, which found us downing some CANADA DRY:

The name of this procedure is taken from the soft drink marketed as “the champagne of ginger ales.” The drink may have bubbles, but it isn’t champagne. In the words of Paul Fournel, who coined the term, a Canada Dry text “has the taste and color of a restriction but does not follow a restriction.” (A musical example is Andrew Bird’s “Fake Palindromes” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqYTTW4hKk&feature=kp) Be creative, and write a poem sourced from your newspaper that sounds like it’s been Oulipo-ed, but hasn’t.

This can be a fun technique, if you allow yourself to pretend there are rules and constraints when there aren't, if that makes any sense. For inspiration and to experience some all-around creative genius-ness, be sure to check out the other Canada Dry poems at Found Poetry Review!

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Shaken, not Speared

To be or not.

To be—that is the question

rough and weathered: Do the daring 

and windy buds of May shake, my darling?

O Woe, all the world is a stage, so what is a name?

A thing that is verboten in the state of Denmark, methinks,

where the Mister’s dove does coo too much! Wailful, my mistress sighs

and nothing like the sun shall compare love's light wings to a summer day. Nay.

A chance to sleep or maybe even dream. Perchance it is an ay here, yay there, nay

everywhere. Everywhere a nay, nay. And where is the rub, Friends? Roaming

the countryside, where men lend us their ears? But now it is the winter.

And of our discontent is this above all: to thine ownself be few 

and far between. For Hope is a thing with horse feathers. 

A horse! Alas, my kingdom is hoarse. O Knight,

good night, parting is such sweet sorrow, 

you may think. I love you. Not.

Poem sources
Indy Star 29 Apr 2014.  [Indianapolis, Indiana]. Print. 

various articles; opinion and advice columns; letters to editor, email, and social media responses; advertising; obituaries; classifieds; weather; legal notices; TV listings and highlights

Process notes

Oh, I got up very early this morning for this technique. I've been concerned about it all month. I couldn't find any further explanation of it other than the instructions above, and I couldn't find any examples. So, I approached it differently than with the previous Oulipost poems: I started out with something already in mind, which is: I wanted it to be an Canada-Dry abomination of famous Shakespeare lines. 

I began this morning by going through the paper searching for words that I could arrange into one of Shakespeare's lines, but it wasn't working. I felt frantic and overwhelmed. So many words, yet I couldn't find my way to a Shakespeare line. 

So I went in reverse and wrote the poem first, using words that would likely be found in the paper, assuming I used a technique called remix, explained below. I then went through the newspaper looking for the words of the poem. If, within the remix constraints I'd given myself, I couldn't find a particular word in the source text, I replaced it with a new word and then tried to find that new word, until I could source all words that were in the poem but one, which is there on purpose.

The Canada-Dry elements (i.e., the techniques or rules being suggested that are not really there), which I hope come across are:

• [cento] I'm hoping that, overall, the poem seems to be cento of some of Shakespeare's more famous lines, which of course it isn't. (There is a suggestion of a line from a nursery rhyme, a Dickinson poem, and an idiom.)
• [keeping the lines, but changing syntax] and that, at first, the poem seems to be Shakespeare's original lines subject to the rule of changing the original syntax
• [homonyms] and that later in the poem, it appears the poem is using homonyms in some consistently patterned way 
• [some sort of snowball/melting snowball] and that it appears the poem is a snowball of sorts, in which lines increase / decrease in some consistent way, such as adding / subtracting two words per line. 

I also Canada-Dried the rule to use what I could find (or remix in this case) in the day's newspaper by including the word verboten, which cannot be found in the source text using the remix rules I established for the poem.

Remix: The process I used for the poem and its title is remix, in which I mixed and rearranged phrases and individual words chosen out of the text, as well as new words that were not in the text, but that were discovered by applying erasure to a word or phrase. The modifications to the source text could include one or more of the following: 

• change in verb tense, e.g. compared --> compare
• concatenation of whole words to form one new word. e.g., country + side --> countryside
• erasure within a word to create a new word, e.g. through --> rough
• erasure within a phrase to form a new word, e.g. the board’s decision  --> hoarse

Oulipost Pre-event Interview

To ramp up for the upcoming Oulipost extravaganza (see Its' Official! I'm an Ouliposter), the fine folks at Found Poetry Review asked each of the 74 (!!) participating poets to answer the following five questions.

 1. WHAT EXCITES YOU ABOUT OULIPOST? 

It promises to be FUN, like a roller coaster ride, both controlled/known and chaotic/unknown at the same time.

• controlled/known in the rules and constraints that will be applied, as well as in the specification of the source text

• chaotic/unknown in that I will be just learning about the majority of the oulipo techniques (for example "beautiful in-law'' and "larding"--what are those??) and won't have any idea of the actual text I need to use until the day that the poem is to be created

The sense of community.

We ouliposters will be adrift together on this experiment-boat for the whole month. None of us knows what to expect, which motivates us to connect with one another through social media. We discuss options, fears, our own limitations, issues with technology. It's a unifying experience.

It's liberating.

When engaged in a creative activity, I find it liberating to be unaffected by judgement, whether it be internal or external judgement. And the whole situation of the oulipost project—the rules and constraints of oulipo, the teeny slice of time that will remain for me to write the poem after attending to work, family, volunteer obligations, etc.—all of these conspire to focus my attention on getting the poem out. There's no time to fall prey to the tyranny of judgement, no time to fester over whether a poem is "good" or not. I'll be grateful if I'm able to write anything at all.

 2. WHAT SCARES YOU ABOUT OULIPOST?

That I will fall woefully behind (I believe most of the ouliposters are concerned about this.)

 3. HAVE YOU WRITTEN EXPERIMENTAL OR FOUND POETRY BEFORE? TELL US ABOUT IT.

I was a participant in the Pulitzer Remix, Found Poetry Review's 2013 National Poetry Month project. The poems I created came about primarily through remix. Afterwards, I was fortunate enough to find a publisher open to publishing a chapbook of some of those poems.

Remix is my favorite method for creating found poems. With remix, I mix and rearrange phrases and individual words chosen out of a selection of text, as well as create new words that are not in the selected text, but that have been discovered by applying erasure to a word or phrase.

Other than the chapbook, I've written the occasional cento, erasure, collage, and other remix poems.

 4. WHAT NEWSPAPER WILL SERVE AS YOUR SOURCE TEXT? 

There is only one newspaper in the county where I live, it's the never-boring Brown County Democrat.

But the Brown County Democrat comes out only once a week, so I'll also be using the The Herald-Times out of Bloomington, Indiana.

Another (somewhat) local paper I'll use is the Indianapolis Star.

And for those times when I want something different, I might go with Wall Street Journal. I like the idea of poetry coming out of Wall Street.

 5. WHO’S YOUR SPIRIT OULIPIAN?

[from Found Poetry Review: Some people have spirit animals. Ouliposters have spirit Oulipians.]

It's a tie between two mathematicians:

Claude Berge, because he loved permutations and equations and he loved language and literature. Becausehe said "what I really enjoy is to sketch things with a paper and pencil, and discover patterns and configurations." Because he wrote a mathematical murder mystery—a duke killed by one of six (or seven?) ex-lovers—investigated Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, solved by Holmes through graph theory.

 ... and Jacques Bens, because he developed the Irrational Sonnet. I am ecstatic that irrational numbers exist. I delight that a sonnet form is patterned after pi. That Bens coined it "the irrational sonnet" makes me dance a wild jig, right now, as if the other versions were rational. Rationed. Ratioed. Sometimes only a number will do.  

It's Official! I'm an Ouliposter

April is National Poetry Month (NaPoMo)!! In celebration, I'll be joining 74 other poets across the globe in Found Poetry Review's OULIPOST project. The project requires each poet to create one poem a day by applying Oulipo techniques—basically constraints and rules—to the day's newspaper. (You'll find more about oulipo later on in this post.)

Each day in April, I'll be writing and posting one poem created from text in a local newspaper based on the constraints and rules for that day. Those constraints and rules will be given to me by the Found Poetry Review editors.

Of course, you can check back here for poems that I write. However, if you'd like access to all of the fabulous Oulipost poets:

• On April 1st, peruse the Oulipost Project page at Found Poetry Review (http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/oulipost/). Poets will be posting links to their poems as they complete them.
• On twitter, we'll be tweeting with the hashtag #oulipost. 
• Some of us will be reposting on Tumblr using the tag oulipost.

And you can get in on the fun, too—become an honorary ouliposter!! I'll be posting the day's constraints and rules, so you can create your own oulipost poem from one of your local newspapers.

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So where does the word Oulipo come from?
It’s the shorten version of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, roughly translated, according to Wikipedia, into "workshop of potential literature." It’s the name of a literary movement started in the 1960s by French poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician Francois Le Lionnais. Poet Mónica de la Torre, in her essay “Into the Maze: OULIPO,” gives two reasons why the Frenchmen banded together:

The concerns of the original members of the Oulipo were, at least, two-fold: on the one hand they wanted to write literature that could not be easily consumed and disposed of, literature that was always in the making. 

Oulipians also wanted to devise a system to guarantee that writers would not run out of innovative formal possibilities. As Queneau wrote in the 1963 essay "Potential Literature," their objective was, "To propose new ‘structures’ to writers, mathematical in nature, or to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that will contribute to literary activity: props for inspiration as it were, or rather, in a way, aids for creativity."

What are oulipo techniques you ask??
Why, they are poetic techniques that make use of constraints as a way to trigger ideas and get inspiration.

Some of the constraints are mathematically based, like the N+7 formula ('noun' + 7), in which you replace a noun in a poem with the seventh noun that follows it in whatever dictionary you happen to be using.

Other constraints are not mathematically based, such as the rule to make a poem out the headlines of today's newspaper. (For more info, the Oulipo page at Drunken Boat contains a number of essays and other resources.