yesterday i listened to margorie perloff discuss some writing constraints of oulipo poets and decided that since i haven’t used artificial constraints for a while, i’d come up with a list of my own.
here are 4 constraints for poems i will write in the next few weeks. (if you want to use them yourself, send me the results. if you have any really fun ones to suggest, let me know.)
1. (a) take the 7th lines out of poems by neruda, pushkin, levertov, ahkmatova, montale, ginsberg, howe, hernandez, char, cavafy, huidobro, clifton, and lowell and combine them as one poem. (b) take the combined poem and run it through a computer translator from english to spanish to french to italian to english. (c) rewrite the garbled translation in any fashion desired.
2. (a) put on a skimpy pair of underwear and go sit in a public park. (b) copy the reactions (only the words) of the park users. (c) arrange the reactions into a sonnet.
3. (a) put a radio in front of a computer microphone so that the voice recognition software can attempt to follow the announcers’ voices. (b) once the voice recognition software has written five pages of text, go through and put the text into lines with ten words each. (c) delete every third line.
4. (a) write a cento then a centino using whitman but thinking about anselm hollo. combine them as one and then (b) send it in the mail to a friend with the instructions to cross out the five worst lines. (c) keep only those five lines as a short poem.
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