Writing By the Rules: OuLiPo N+7

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. (© Archives Pontigny-Cerisy)

OuLiPo

An acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), a group of writers and mathematicians formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. Unlike the Dada and surrealist movements, OuLiPo rejects spontaneous chance and the subconscious as sources of literary creativity. Instead, the group emphasizes systematic, self-restricting means of making texts. For example, the technique known as n + 7 replaces every noun in an existing text with the noun that follows seven entries after it in the dictionary. Notable members of this group include the novelists George Perec and Italo Calvino, poet Oskar Pastior, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

A New Game

A few weeks ago, I came across an article in my news feed about OuLiPo that piqued my interest. I had never heard of the technique before, and I could easily imagine how the simple substitution method could be applied in a classroom scenario.

When I was a Library Assistant at an elementary school, I was in charge of teaching "library" to Kindergarten children. One of the lessons I used during National Poetry Month (April) was a classroom version of MadLibs, where the students would come up with substitution words for a chosen poem. Once they had gathered the necessary number of words, I would read the original work and then read their "MadLibs" version, to sometimes hilarious results. It was a lot of fun and the kids would remember the exercise for a long time.

I decided to try the n+7 OuLiPo exercise on a poem I wrote in elementary school. I must have been no more than 10 years old when I penned The Willow. Apparently, I've always been fascinated by Salix babylonica

                            The Willow
 
                   Its leaves are like teardrops
                   That fall to the ground
 
                   The happiness it longs for
                   Was lost, but not found
 
                   The song of the bluebird
                   Will not cheer it up
                  
                   The willow–it feels
                   Like a broken tea cup
 
                   The happiness is with
                   All the other big trees
 
                   It stands, broken-hearted
                   While it waits for a breeze

First Try

I was excited to use my massive 1947 Webster's dictionary that I had purchased years ago at a flea market for $9. Imagine the possibilities with all those words!

No "ginormous" in here

A thing of beauty

I decided to be stringent with the rules, and to also only count entries that actually had the "n." after them, because I quickly discovered many proper nouns were included as entries. I followed the suggested method below from poets.org:

"Care is taken to ensure that the substitution is not just a compound derivative of the original, or shares a similar root, but a wholly different word. Results can vary widely depending on the version of the dictionary one uses."

Here's what happened:

                             The Willow
 
                   Its le branchos are like teases
                   That fall to the grout
 
                   The hapteron it longs for
                   Was lost, but not found
 
                   The sonority of the blunderhead
                   Will not cheer it up
                  
                   The wily wicket–it feels
                   Like a broken teamster
 
                   The hapteron is with
                   All the other big treilages
 
                   It stands, broken-hearted
                   While it waits for a breloque

Um...okay...

"Le branchos"? Is it a hare? Is it a fish?

I've never heard anyone use "breloque" in a sentence.

I was a little disappointed with the outcome. Not gonna lie. But that's what I get for using a 70 year old dictionary. What did I think would happen?

Second Try

Not one to be deterred, I decided to try the exercise with another, newer (1995) dictionary that my children used in elementary school.

No "ginormous" entry here, either

Here is the result:

                                The Willow
 
                   Its lectors are like technicians
                   That fall to the grove
 
                   The hardback it longs for
                   Was lost, but not found
 
                   The son-in-law of the B lymphocyte
                   Will not cheer it up
                  
                   The winch–it feels
                   Like a broken teamwork
 
                   The hardback is with
                   All the other big trematodes
 
                   It stands, broken-hearted
                   While it waits for a brick

All right. A bit funnier. It calls me back to my Medical Technology days with nouns like "B lymphocyte" and "trematodes". 

I was still a little disappointed with the results. Should I be disappointed? It's all about the process, right? I wonder how many poems and how many tries it would take to create something more palatable?

​I must also remember that I used a poem written by a 10 year old.

Curated OuLiPo

I knew the method must have resulted in some fabulous poems at some point, so I did a quick internet search and found a seemingly endless supply. Here is one I enjoyed:

The extract, from Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

The transformed version, using N + 7:

To see a Worm in a Grampus of Sandblast
And a Hebe in a Wild Flu
Hold inflow in the palsy of your hangar
And Ethos in an housefly.

They did the work so you don't have to. Isn't that better? There are many more examples, and I even found an online N+7 generator, but that seems like cheating.

I think this exercise is a valuable tool to help those struggling with creativity in writing, at least as a structured way to break out of a rut. It seems to me children would enjoy the safety of the set parameters at first, and then maybe veer off into more creative writing. It got me thinking about words in a different way and it made me use an actual dictionary, rather than searching online for a word. 

I will use this exercise again, whenever I am struggling with a writing rut. The spark has been lit!