7 April 2013

Poem 7 - An Oulipo Effort


Photo: Sally Douglas


Leftist

You are not open to recreation the deadbeat.
The window-dresser wants to turn
the straitjacket on, but you are loaded
with the day’s dust-up,
so each flywheel dies.
You did not open to recreation the deadbeat,
but you are open anyway,
and on you lifespans
the brew of bonds,
the giggles of households, limps,
the curled hairpiece of woodcutters
and the shorn hairpiece of brags,
powdered bridgeheads and skirmish –
carried here to splay you flautist and helpless

the deadbeat so heavy on your faction.

Sally Douglas

There once was a poem which did not please the poet because it was too slick and inauthentic. So the poet fed it, title and all, into a machine, an N+7 machine. And the poet liked it a lot more after that.

The N+7 (or S+7 in the original French) is one of the methods used by the Oulipo movement. These writers used chance and constraints to trigger ideas. And when it works, the poetry of chance can be so satisfying!


Thanks to Jo Bell for the link to the machine, which saved me doing the job manually.

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