Oulipo, NaPo and me

In January, Janice Soderling posted a call for submissions on Eratosphere for Sein und Werden's forthcoming Oulipo issue. I sent three poems, and received an acceptance within hours.

The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentiale) was formed in France in 1960, as reaction against the surrealists' emphasis on the aleatory and the subconscious. It aims to invent constraints for generating literature as an alternative to received forms. Perhaps the best known are the lipogram (leaving out one or more letters of the alphabet) and S&7 (originally replacing all nouns in a text with the seventh noun following it in the dictionary). Oulipo also "adopted" pre-existing constraints such as the sestina (and worked out the mathematics of the quenina, a generalized form which can be adapted to a variety of stanza-lengths).

Upon perusing an online French list of constraints and the 2005 edition of Mathews & Brotchie's Oulipo Compendium - the best resource on The Oulipo available in English - I discovered that, in addition to the Oulipoems I had written knowingly, I had unwittingly written many others. Some constraints I had taken from prompts I encountered here and there without knowing they were oulipian; others I had arrived at independently.

I then decided that Oulipo would be my focus during National Poetry Writing Month. This was the eighth year I did NaPo and it was by far the easiest; I had a list of things to try and a clear focus, and only found myself at a loss once or twice; it was even easy to make up what I had missed by being out of town for five days. It was an added encouragement that folks who were also doing NaPo on The Waters were at times inspired to try some of the constraints.

I will provide links to some of my Oulipian efforts in a future post.

Back again, I hope

I haven't been able to give much attention to poetry this past year. Starting last summer, my husband had a serious bout with cancer, and lost an eye as a result. We were blessed to have good support during this time, from family and friends and from the wonderful doctors and staff of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. We hope we are out of the woods, at least for now (at our age one is never out of the woods completely).

Several new poems have been published in the meantime. I am now updating the sidebar. I was able to participate in National Poetry Writing Month in April – more about that later.

Recent publications: The Ghazal Page

The June 2013 issue contains three of my ghazals:
The Cosmos,
Out of context, and
To be light.

Altogether it's a great issue, with contributions that push the boundary of the ghazal in this way and that. I was particularly intrigued by Karla Linn Merrifield's fractal/ghazal hybrids. As always, Gene Doty adds his comments on each poem.

You can find more about The Ghazal page and my contributions to it in the post for May 30, 2010. It contains links to all of my ghazals previously published there. (Published later but never noted here in a post was Change. In that one, I maintained the monorhyme but rung changes on the radif.)

Recent publications: Disembodied Text, KIN, Danse Macabre

Disembodied Text is a fledgling themed zine which has recently changed from weekly to monthly. The editors see it as a sort of gallery space where literary, visual and auditory works around a given theme can interact. Issue 5, "Disembodied animals and abstraction," includes my poems "Leave thy low-vaulted past" and "Perspective".

KIN, aka Kin Poetry Journal, is a form-friendly zine with an adventurous spirit. Issue VIII includes my rubliw, Dispatch from the Kremlin. The form was invented by Richard Wilbur and named by Lewis Turco ("wilbur" backwards).

Danse Macabre is a quirky zine in more ways than one. Their new server apparently doesn't allow them to link to individual pages within an issue, so I can't post links to individual poems on the sidebar. Issue 68 contains three poems of mine on the theme of unwanted communications: "From the circular file," "From the spam folder," and "The unknown caller." If you're feeling tntrepid enough to seek them out, the above link should take you to the issue home page (Heimat / Cosmos). Clicking on "Poetry" at the pink menu to the left should produce a turquoise menu. Click on the 4th one down, "Tre entro tre". There's a cameo NNW of the picture on the right, at the top of a light-colored vertical bar. That's the scroll bar. If you drag the cameo thing about 3/4 of the way down the picture frame you'll come to my first poem.

Recent publication(s): Chain ghazal: Chickens

I've been in a dry place and haven't been writing much poetry lately. I hang out now and then at the Sunset Beach section of The Waters – where, besides participating in NaPoWriMo, one may write 7 poems in 7 days at any time in the company of a small but nurturing group of people who cheer each other on. In January I tried a 7/7 and lasted three days. One of the three poems was an attempt at a hybrid ghazal/pantoum, though it came out more like a blues. The first draft had 3-line stanzas; the later version has four, with the third unrhymed to give it the feel of a ghazal's first two shers.

Gene Doty published it in the March issue of The Ghazal Page, and notified me a few days later that Carol Rumens, who writes a weekly column in The Guardian, had asked to use it as her "poem of the week." It appeared there on March 18; when last I looked there were over 200 comments, including many imitations and parodies. On March 20 it was posted on 3quarksdaily, which I'd never heard of, but my son says Azra Raza is his friend's wife's friend's cousin, so obviously it was a put-up job.

I'm feeling somewhat overwhelmed by all this. I had intended to give NaPoWriMo a miss this year, but now I am energized and will be participating – for which I am immensely grateful to Gene and Carol.

My Poetry Archive: Cartographie Curieux, The Centrifugal Eye

Cartographie Curieux is a new zine with an unusual slant: The editors are "interested in the curious geographies that everyone must navigate as they travel through life. We are obsessed with finding ourselves and we are looking for some good maps to get us there" poetry, fiction, visual media, etc. The zine, which is in blog form, officially launched on May 25, and my poem Trail to the Treasure of Al the Awful was the first and so far the only post. Do go to the submissions page and scroll down to where it says "Some maps we’d love to publish". Perhaps you'll be inspired to submit. I'm very curious to see what other cartographies will appear on this site.

The Spring/Summer issue of The Centrifugal Eye is themed "J Is for Jabberwocky: A Glossarium of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Allegory, Myth & Legend in Poetic Form." Two of my poems, World-Saving Poem and Return of the Zed-A, are in the Science Fiction section.

My poetry archive: Lyre Lyre and Infinity's Kitchen

Lyre Lyre is a fairly new ezine of surreal bent; they made me the portfolio poet for issue three, with four poems: "Old Sugar-Spike is dead," "This just in from the footfarm," "Shards of bottled ivory" (a homophonic translation based on Arthur Rimbaud's "Le bateau ivre"), and "The five bats of unhappiness."

Infinity's Kitchen has separate online and print magazines. Issue 5 of the former included my shaped poem Spooked. The print version is so far out I was surprised they'd accepted my work when I saw the company I was in. My very-tame-by-comparison contribution was an antonymic translation. The idea, which I got from a book on Oulipo, is to replace most of the words in an existing poem by their opposites, or the words don't have opposites, something in that direction. Here is the poem; I'll leave you to identify the source:

The Penultimate Going

Straightening, straightening out the narrowing plane
The warbler listens to the warble-ee;
Ideas coalesce, the periphery can drop,
Rank stringency is bound below the sun,
The wine-bright ebb is bound, and nowhere is
The free-for-all of guilt resuscitated;
The worst have no acquittal, while the best
Are void of apathetic listlessness.

There's no proof any concealment is afoot;
No proof the Penultimate Going is afoot;
The Penultimate Going! Softly these deeds are in
When a wee archetype in Corpus Coeli
Oils your hearing; outside rocks of the ocean
A haze without lamb's mind or the foot of a mouse,
Closed eyes crammed and merciful as the moon,
Is resting its fast shins, while irrelevant to it
Unwinds the light of cheerful fish of the sea.
The first time daylight rises, you're unaware
That a single second of warm insomnia
Was pleased to sweet dreams by a static coffin,
And what smooth bird, its moment gone square long since,
Prances away from Golgotha to be killed?