This post is also related to two of Lewis Oakwood’s poems on his site, visit to a flea market and a storeroom, http://thecuttingpoets.wordpress.com/ Please give them a read as well. I am working with Lewis on perhaps reviving some of those orphan lines we all seem to accumulate.
As a kind of farewell and wrapup, we’ve been asked to post an exit interview, discussing the Oulipost experience. It will take awhile still to absorb and understand Oulipo, I think, but that’s why I purchased the Oulipo Compendium. That will keep me going forever! And thanks so much to the Found Poetry Review, for pulling this all together! What a ride, as one of my fellow Ouliposters said!
So, what now and what’s next? Herewith:
Oulipost Exit Interview: Oulipost Ends Where the Work Begins
Question 1:
What happened during Oulipost that you didn’t expect? What are the best (or worst) moments for you?
Well, going in, I didn’t know a lot about Oulipo experimental writing, although I’d had a bit of an intro while taking Modern & Contemporary American Poetry with Al Filreis UPenn, through Coursera.
Some of the scariest sounding prompts turned out to be the most fun. And often the ones that sounded really quite straightforward turned out to be anything but. And I never expected ever to write a poem with zombies in it, much less a zombie sonnet on a day that was not a sonnet prompt. It was Day 9, create a poem from headlines. Zombies just jumped out from the page and off I went. And I found the hardest ones were the ones with selected letters to be used or to be avoided.
I also enjoyed the discussions with the other Ouliposters and their ideas, which often helped me get started in the mornings.
Question 3:
What does your street look like?
Aha! We encounter Oulipo even in the questions. Ok, I will do Q3 next then about something totally off-track. My street is a cornucopia of cars and kids cavorting. No, actually it often looks like a parking lot. Mostly townhomes, and a bedroom community for Ottawa. Everyone has more vehicles than their driveways and single garages will hold. But lovely in spring and fall when the trees, now nearly 20 years old, are either in blossom or in full fall colour.
Question 4:
Who is your spirit Oulipostian? 
I didn’t have one going in, and I am not sure I have one coming out. On occasion, John Beryman, on others Christian Bök, a Canadian poet who wrote Eunoia, which won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, which had 5 chapters, each using a single vowel. Interesting concept, read more about him here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_B%C3%B6k Perhaps also Tristan Tzara, although not an Oulipolian, did create Dadaist poetry.
English: tristan Tzara Español: Tristan Tzara pero en Español (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Question 5:
What are the top three poems you wrote during this project?
Ooh, not fair! I’m not sure I can narrow down to three. Day 7’s N+7 poem, Behind Closed Doors on Parliament Hill is one. Strangely enough, Day 19’s sestina poem, Zoo Variations. Of course, thanks are due again to Doug Luman and his wonderful tools, which made this a whole lot easier, and actually do-able in a single day. Probably the last one would be the Patchwork Quilt, In a Vacant Lounge in Canada, I Too sat Dowse and Wept,taking lines from all the poems written over the 30 days, simply because it does revisit some of the best lines from all the poems, but then again, there are the two Antonymy poems from April 22, Buy the Pigeon, Sell Carnivores and A Silence Out of Mid-Summer. Both these have a combination of sensical lines and nonsense. I think overall, I liked the ones that had interesting and startling juxtapositions, and were a bit or a lot outside my usual “coherence.”
A city pigeon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Question 2:
What questions do you have for your teaspoons? What questions do your teaspoons have for you?
Questions for my teaspoons:
Teaspoons (Photo credit: eltpics)
Why don’t you hold more sugar?
Why is there only one of you in a set of measuring spoons, at least one for wet and another for dry?
Why are you almost always heaping when you are not scant?
Questions my teaspoons have for me:
Why do you scoop around the slice of stale bread, the clay honeybear and the measuring scoop instead of moving them out of the way first?
Why don’t you use more jam and less oil, since we all have a sweet-tooth too?
Why do you keep us here in the dark when we really want to watch Big Bang Theory?
Teaspoon… (Photo credit: vanherdehaage)
Question 6:
What will you do next?
Hoping to put together a regular submission plan (and implement it!) and to work on the three chapbooks/collections I have in process, including, now, the Oulipo ones. My title for that so far is Newspaper Clippings. And definitely, definitely doing more Oulipo!
One of several versions of the painting “The Scream”. The National Gallery, Oslo, Norway. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Conclude the project by writing a poem that incorporates words and lines from all of your past 29 poems.
Sounds simple enough, till you try to distill 29 days of Oulipo into a single piece. Well, it’s a draft, as always, and rather fun to revisit the various ideas and images that inspired me or drove me crazy over the past month. I will miss the back-and-forth dialogue with fellow Ouliposters, but I received my Oulipo Compendium yesterday in the mail, all the way from Gloucester in the UK, so I’m looking forward to more of this, without the newspaper constraint. Hope you’ve enjoyed the poems. For more patchworks, please visit the Oulipost blog here: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/oulipost-30-patchwork-quilt/
IN A VACANT LOUNGE IN CANADA, I TOO SAT DOWSE AND WEPT
Winter, mid snowman. City parks bare, a soundscape of static and feedback.
This boggy tip of Newfoundland’s northern landscape, sullen winds hang low,
a cloud of irritation and icy Arctic sky send shivers through indigenous
eyes-locked people. Diamonds locked earth deep beneath limestone fissures,
ET dumped in a hole in Alamagordo. Hogs Back Falls aren’t behavioural.
Hog’s Back Falls (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Cheesemakers experimenting.Latest gastronomical experiment: crickets.
A bad-police-car idea to the letter. Check germ level. Net expert levels set.
The diaper had a lot to say, the little packet of cheese too. Saint’s jawbone,
several teeth, the finest strained carrots the size of garbage can lids—
the martyr’s blood liquifies. All assemble into a gelatinous creature,
a Frankenstein’s monster that never comes to life.
All puffball poke written in weird.
Everyone is guilty of something.
Lest we forget, it’s all about the tulips.
Tall chaw-down mothers run up, up, up, up, Stones-style, bruises,
bumps and beers, along the northern peak outside Belfast,
in shades of moral greys and déjà vu, cinctured with peanut.
Armies win wars, women, and even ice cream in various versions.
Good food and dog excrement blended up together.
Buy pigeons, sell carnivores. They’re going to give us ponchos.
We are on the cusp of the gaffe sizzle of Ottawa, mope-up laws of
fissure-written autobiography, further perfection of extreme evil
in 35 cries and as one dance.
Cigarette lighters mask the toothbrush lumber. Backyards have gone barren.
Inuit seals hunt zombie MPs. Most hunt members of the rodent species,
spring-loaded impalas, barcode wobbly-legged zebras.
Chickens search for grubs through cow pats. Aimless now; it was aimless then.
Savannah scrubland trees never bend to hear a river, ancient wisdom
taught them music in the soil. Dust of a life cannot kill the crocus.
We cannot remain the seed. If an ash tree falls in your forest, it falls on you.
The conflicted emotions, the shell-shock job of simply loving someone who dies.
To die, the agonizing job of suicides. Death isn’t inside-out water sieves or
sand dunes, the subsurface shock factor, depressed friend gone to
the dark side: a long suicide attempt involving pills and knives and bleach.
All puny sorrows nuanced; the subsequent overshadowed, insignificant.
Puppet dinosaurs, tiny sweating puppet people and sprawl of drunken louts
know when to take this step. All the heavy stuff happens in music.
It is all the breath that knows practising three hours a day at too steep
an angle to learn more about swooping can rob you of your remnants.
The clinical madness of the occult debris affects 80% of beachcombers,
silliness from trying to make the status quo look rational.
I tried to come in with a few more lingos. I tried to come in with a smile.
CAS, April 30, 2014
Portrait of Buffalo Bob Smith and Howdy Doody: Fort Lauderdale, Florida (Photo credit: State Library and Archives of Florida)
A text in which each word has one letter less than the preceding one, and the last word only one letter. From your newspaper, select a starting word, and then continue adding words of decreasing length from the same source article or passage. Challenge yourself further by only using words in order as you encounter them in the text.
I was sufficiently challenged by just finding the words that led down to a single character, and took liberties with that, as my choices were a or I, and neither worked well, so I resorted to numbers, and in at least one case stole it from a longer one.
Once I had my source text, I removed all extraneous characters and spaces so I could run it through a tool that sorted by word length. It was getting confused by the commas and quotation marks. I then reviewed the list and calculated the letter counts for each group.
Here are my resulting snowballs, three of them, each beginning with a 13-letter word:
I.
DEEP WATER
Extraordinary
encapsulated
Geological
resources
evidence
diamond
locked
Earth
deep
520
to
0.
Jellyfish (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
II.
Jellyfish Float
Invertebrates,
accidentally
translucent.
Gelatinous
creature,
floating
jellies.
Dragon
under
seas:
one
or
2.
III.
Underwater Rainbow. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Diving Into the Veins
Decompressing
environments
inner-Earth
underwater
limestone
fissures
beneath
Mother
Earth
dive
for
20
7
CAS, April 28, 2014
Spears, Tom, Finding Earth’s huge water reservoir, Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 28, 2014 (B3)
Spears, Tom, Swimming “through the veins of Mother Earth”, Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 28, 2014 (B3)
Neergaard, Lauran, Unique floating lab showcases ‘aliens of the sea’, Ottawa Citizen, April 28, 2014 (A6)
For women living with heart disease
prep for quillfyre updates
reflections & writing prompts for living with serious or life-threatening illnesses
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