Grave Unseriousness: Experimenting with Oulipo Constraints

The poet Ruth Stone is known for sensing a poem thundering at her over the landscape and running like hell for home to write it down. Sometimes, she’d catch it by the tail; other times, she’d miss it just barely and the poem would pass on, searching for the next open channel.

In my case, the members of Oulipo—the dead ones—kept knocking until I opened the door. Italo Calvino nearly broke through in 2010, but I didn’t make the leap from Invisible Cities to the semi-secret cohort he belonged to until 2022. A brisk mention in an art class snagged my attention—oo-lee-po—what does it mean?

Founded by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais in 1960, the members of Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, approximately translated “Workshop for Potential Literature”) found inspiration at the intersection of mathematics, literary constraints, and the freedom to break form. As a collective, Oulipo sought both literary potential and exhaustion, meaning literature that doesn’t yet exist and literature that can be produced or attempted in exponential quantities. As Queneau described, the Oulipo were, “Rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”

When the spirits of Queneau, Le Lionnais, Calvino, and Georges Perec stepped through the portal, I was reeling from burnout. That’s why I’d taken the art class: to try something different that might revive my writing. The more I researched Oulipo, the more I found hidden in plain sight: turns out, I’d read works by several Oulipo writers without making the connection. Daniel Levin Becker’s excellent Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature illuminated the group’s history and ethos, while The Penguin Book of Oulipo, edited by Philip Terry, offered samples of their constraint-based work. (Both authors are members of Oulipo.)

Here, it’s worth noting that constraints differ from prompts, which offer a subject, theme, or direction from which one may write freely. Constraints are rigorously defined, premeditated rules of composition. (For some writers, the devising of constraints is an end in itself.) Oulipo’s open-source spirit encourages members to test and modify each other’s constraints and to share work at gatherings called jeudis (these events originally took place on Thursdays). 

On a lark, I tried some of their constraints. Because my efforts were about experimentation—Oulipo’s engine drives toward potential rather than “success”—the results were surprising. The more lyric, echoing, or nonsensical my output, the more hauntingly true and strangely humorous it was. I produced writing I never would have, had I set out to create something “good” or “weird.”

Each attempt opened worlds I couldn’t have imagined—except they were part of my imagination, weren’t they? These ideas were inside me all along, yearning to be set loose. The key was coming at them slant and letting go of perfectionism, orderliness, and the pressure to produce something useful. It felt ironic—subversive, even—that constraints applied to exhaustion could revivify my tired brain.

Constraints are outstretched hands, offering a place to begin. They interrupt one’s habits and tics, helping to surface the strange. Having experienced their fertile influence on my own writing, I began to incorporate Oulipian constraints and methods into my classes. It still feels magical, watching even the skeptical writers find inspiration from pulling up to the workbench to test, try, and fiddle.

Levin Becker writes, “When you don’t know what you’re looking for, your chances of finding it are excellent.” This speaks to the grave unseriousness of Oulipo’s approach—both necessary and futile—of which Perec was a particular beneficiary. It removes the pressure to be efficient or productive while, in fact, stimulating creative production. Writing becomes a practice of not merely looking once, but looking again and again until what you took for granted appears fresh. In Oulipo reside many lessons: process over product, attempts over solutions, and the power of camaraderie in an otherwise solitary pursuit. Even “failure” isn’t the end—it’s a hypothesis that fuels that next attempt.

Harry Mathews, a member of Oulipo and the New York School, observed, “Solutions are nearly always disappointing.” I agree. Oulipo has helped me leave behind conclusions for questions. The deeper my studies of Oulipo go, the more nourished my creative practice becomes. Far from blank, the page appears porous, entangled, and brimming with possibility. Writing is a verdant, outward unfurling (growth) rather than a forward or linear motion (progress), and exhaustion isn’t inherently negative—it can mean realization, too.

Beyond constraints, there’s a multilayered world of Oulipo to discover, including their relationship to mathematics and translation. At 64 years old, Oulipo has outlived every other 20th-century literary movement—and they’re still going. Visit their website to learn more, including how to watch their jeudis (now held on Tuesdays) online.

S+7: Do Try This at Home

Need a creative boost? Experiment with this version of S+7, one of the first Oulipo constraints, which we tried in my Forms & Features workshop. 

Devised by Jean Lescure, the S+7 method consists of replacing each noun (S) of a preexisting text with the seventh noun found after it (+7) in a dictionary. (Note: S = substantive. In English, it’s often referred to as N+7 where N = noun.)

1. To create your “host” text, write for a few minutes about what shaped you as a child. Rather than people or places, lean into a concept, experience, or phenomenon that played a significant role in how you view the world or who you are: humidity, swimming, rumors, bird song, and so forth. Tap into the physical to explore the ephemeral.
2. Using an analog dictionary, transform your free write by replacing each noun with the seventh noun found after it in the dictionary.
3. Select a sentence or two from your altered text to use as the first lines of a new free write. This version will be more lyric, uncanny, and possibly nonsensical. Your chosen concept will have changed into a new word, too. Lean into the altered voice and perspective that S+7 has opened up. Let it lead you into a different notion of yourself and the past, follow the real into the imagined.
4. When you’re done with the draft, compare the versions. What happened that was unexpected or different from the first to the second? What ideas or memories opened up—or changed? Where do the real and the imagined meet? What habits, patterns, or tendencies do you notice in your first draft?
5. Experiment, adapt, iterate. Extend the S+7 method to other parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, adverbs—again, the substantive parts). Vary the numbers, plus or minus (forward or back) in the dictionary.

Recommended reading:

Books

• Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature by Daniel Levin Becker.
• Oulipo and the Mathematics of Literature by Natalie Berkman.
• Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie.
• The Penguin Book of Oulipo: Queneau, Perec, Calvino and the Adventure of Form edited by Philip Terry.

Articles

• On the lasting importance of Georges Perec by Darran Anderson in 3:AM.
• Jean Lescure from "The N+7 Method" in McSweeney’s.