A Collection of Oulipo Exercises
Meeting of the Oulipo in Boulogne, near Paris, on September 23, 1975, in the garden of François Le Lionnais (Italo Calvino is in the center with an open newspaper, at founder Raymond Queneau’s right).
Oulipo, or OuLiPo, stands for “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle,” which translates roughly as “workshop of potential literature.” It is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians, and seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members include novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud, and one American member, Harry Mathews. The group defines the term ‘littérature potentielle’ as (rough translation): “the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.”
Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec’s “story-making machine,” which he used in the construction of Life: A User’s Manual. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms (Perec’s novel A Void) and palindromes, the group devises new techniques, often based on mathematical problems such as the Knight’s Tour of the chess-board and permutations.
“Oulipo” entry. Wikipedia. 13 October 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo>.
The Un-Redundancy Exercise
also known as “haikuization”
Materials: piece of writing.
- Select a piece of writing.
- For each line, replace it with only one, two, or three words, either from the end or the beginning of the line. Decide on the number depending on how long the piece of writing’s lines are, and stick to that number.
- For example, if a line of a piece of writing is:
I called up my sister and she started to chew me out.
Replace it with the following:
Chew me out. - Repeat until end of piece of writing.
Variation: The Slugogram To slug your work in proofreading is to match up the words in the right-hand margin to quickly make sure nothing was changed from printout to printout. In this variation, you just use the last right-hand word in your draft and start over, write a sentence using those slugged words.
Adapted from:
Motte, Warren F., trans. and ed. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1986.
Raymond Queneau, disussing this constraint, writes:
What is the point of this? Primo, I obtain a new poem which, upon my word, is not so bad, and one should never complain if one finds beautiful poems. Secundo, one has the impression that there is almost as much in the restriction as in the entire poem … Tertio: without going to the far limits of sacrilege, one can say that this restriction sheds light on the original poem; it is not wholly without exegetical value and may contribute to interpretation. (59)
The Isomorphism Exercise
Materials: piece of writing.
- Select a piece of writing.
- For each word, replace it with a word that sounds like the word phonetically, syllable for syllable. For example, if a line of a piece of writing is:
I called up my sister and she started to chew me out.
Replace it with the following:
My hauled cup high mister hand he hearted two stew she gout. - Obviously, don’t worry about making sense so much. Just replace the words that sound like them.
- Repeat until end of piece of writing.
Adapted from:
Motte, Warren F., trans. and ed. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1986.
The N + 7 Exercise
Materials: English dictionary, piece of writing.
- Select a piece of writing.
- Underline all of the substantial nouns in the piece of writing; in other words, underline all the nouns except for pronouns (he, she, it, we, you, they).
- Look up a noun in the dictionary.
- From that noun’s entry in the dictionary, count forward alphabetically seven (7) noun entries.
- Replace the first noun with this new, N + 7 noun you just found.
- Repeat until end of piece of writing.
Don’t have a print dictionary? First, shame on you. Second, did you know there was an online N+7 generator? We didn’t either. Now we’re in bidness! The N+7 method involves replace every noun in a text with the word that falls 7 places ahead of it in the dictionary. No more telling students to bring their print dictionaries into class. (They don’t own them, for one).
One variation: use results include the texts as N+0 (i.e., the original version), N+1, N+2, on up to N+15.
Another variation: Use Princeton’s Wordnet instead.
Adapted from:
Motte, Warren F., trans. and ed. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1986.
The False Translation Exercise
also known as “false translation,” “homophonic translation,” or “homolinguistic translation”
Materials: non-English text, piece of writing.
- Select a passage of text—it can be a poem, but it doesn’t need to be—in a language other than English for which you have received no instruction, formal or informal
- A text from a Romance Language (Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Portuguese), but Latin and German and others work as well
- Going word by word, “translate” each word or group of words to resemble utterances, thoughts, phrases in English.
- Repeat until end of selected text.
Adapted from:
Motte, Warren F., trans. and ed. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1986.
The Lipogram Exercise
A lipogram is a text that excludes on or more letters of the alphabet. There are, obviously, harder and easier versions of writing or creating a lipogram: exluding a vowel would be more difficult than exluding z, , x, or u.
“The lipogram often passes unnoticed until it is announced,” Harry Mathews writes.
Materials: non-English text, piece of writing.
- Select a passage of text to re-write (your own or someone else’s) of or use a blank page.
- Select your lipogrammatic contstraint.
- Repeat until end of selected text.
Some variations of the lipogram:
Rewrite using only one vowel, creating a univocalic text.
The beautiful in-law, a letter in which the letters of an addressee’s name is successively excluded from the writing.
The beautiful out-law, a piece of writing in which each line or sentence must use all letters of the alphabet.
Left- or right-handed lipogram, a piece of writing that uses only letters on the left- or right-hand side of the keyboard.
Liponym: Working with a passage of your own text, rewrite the passage without one or more words—the, a, one, etc.
Working with a passage of your own text, rewrite your the passage using only one-syllable words. (See The Pilgrim’s Progress in Words of One Syllable by Mary Godolphin.)
The prisoner’s constraint. (It’s also called the “macao” constraint, but I don’t know why). This is a lipogram that excludes letters with legs (i.e., b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, and y).
The Anagrammatical Text Exercise
Anagrammatical text. Working with one key sentence from a source text—your own or another source—create a series of lines or sentences made exclusively of anagrams from that text.
Example: “Form is an extension of content” becomes “A Nonexistence Fits Front Mono.”
Here is an online anagram generator.
The Métro Poem
This is a poem composed in the métro, during the duration of a trip. Here are the guidelines; I would imagine these are adaptable for your local public transportation system:
A métro poem has as many verses as your trip has stations, minus one.
The first verse is composed in your head between the two first stations of your trip (counting the station from which you departed).
It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the second station.
The second verse is composed in your head between the second and third stations of your trip.
It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the third station. And so forth.
One must not transcribe when the train is in motion.
One must not compose when the train is stopped.
The last verse of the poem is transcribed on the platform of your last station.
If your trip involves one or more changes of subway lines, the poem will have two or more stanzas.
Related Articles and Links
- The online literary journal Drunken Boat‘s Oulipo feature
- Overriding small caps in Oulipo (wpbtips.wordpress.com)
- The Sixth Memo of Italo Calvino (themillions.com)
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