I've stepped into new territory this week with an online course at the Poetry School called 'Adventures in Form'. The first assignment was to write an Oulipo (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle or Workshop of Potential Literature) sonnet. This involves choosing a sign or slogan which you use as your title and then writing a sonnet only using the letters available from the title. Does that make sense? I used a well known brand name in my title, not sure if I'm allowed to mention it here, but it was 'Things Go Better With C--- C---' and my first two lines were 'Scene one; a ghost town in Castilla/the off-stage chatter of castanets...' It took hours and I nearly gave up on it. You can play around a bit, and as you can see, I've already cheated in the first lines.
The second assignment was to write an N +7 poem. This involves replacing every noun in a text with the 7th noun after it in a dictionary. The results are great fun and turn up some great juxtapositions. I used it on a poem I've been trying to write for ages about a boy who thinks he's a super-hero. I couldn't get the right quirkiness, and then using N + 7 it turned up some wonderful words that worked really well. I only chose the ones that I wanted. You can go from N + 1 to any number you want.
(I don't know why my formatting has gone wrong here, but I shall try and work it out!)
