24 April 2013

Poem 20 - More Fun with Oulipo Constraints


Photo: Sally Douglas

This Day's Constraint

Today is a death to sleep.
This set of hours is rest’s oblivion.
Day and dark want that fall’s fall,
ticking tiredly away 
Wednesday, respite’s murderer.
Tomorrow is the birth of wakening.
Today is a day to sleep.


I sit within indigo hills, in wing-singing wind,
below a slope of blade south-east.
On the ground beneath the sounds,
I am low in a sky of calling flight
all arching, flying, hymning over.
Oh, low moon-bowl of owl solos
below a sky of birdsong.



This poem is a result of a bit more playing with OULIPO constraints. The Oulipo Compendium (ed Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, Atlas Press, 2005), describes a way of submitting a line or a stanza of poetry to a series of variations, thereby creating a new piece of work. It sounds both straightforward, and weird. It is weird, but it's surprisingly difficult to do, and the constraints force a creativity with language which can have very satisfying and surprising results. The poem above took some lines from yesterday's poem (actually I combined some shorter lines to make longer ones for this purpose), and submitted them to the following constraints:

First Stanza

  1. First line in N+7
  2. First line as a lipogram in a
  3. First line as a univocalism in a
  4. First line with nouns eliminated
  5. First line with verbs eliminated
  6. First line treated antonymically
  7. First line in its original form

Second Stanza

  1. Second line as a univocalism in i
  2. Second line in N+7
  3. Second line with verbs eliminated
  4. Second line as a lipogram in e
  5. Second line with nouns eliminated
  6. Second line as a univocalism in o (Actually this should use the first line, but I made a mistake!)
  7. Second line in its original form
It's fun to do, and really stretches the brain! I can't claim that it produced a fabulous poem, but I think it's a brilliant exercise to get the language muscles flexing without having to face the terror of the blank page.  

And I hope I haven't made any glaring errors when applying the constraints.
Or possibly, I hostage I haven't made any glaring europeans when applying the containers...

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