Oulipoems

Creative Work
Year: 
2004
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CC Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
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Oulipoems is a series of six interactive poetry Flash works, ranging from electronic poems, to games, to a tool for generating and writing poetry using the vocabulary of a variety of poets. The pieces are loosely based on the Oulipo movement in French literature, which focused on texts based on constraints (for instance, Perec's famous novel A Void, a lipogram in which the letter e does not appear) and also on mixtures of literature and mathematics. The six works are (1) "Sundays in the Park," a user-modifiable nonsense poem with a political tone; (2) "Morningside Vector Space," a text which comes in several versions and which can be adjusted to display mixtures of the versions, based on Queneau's Exercises de Style but set in New York's Morningside Heights; (3) "No War," an interactive sound poem about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, using phonetic constraints; (4) "Headline News," a Rubik's cube-like game which allows users to compose poetry fragments or try to restore the original configuration, using sound (alliteration) constraints and political humor; (5) "Poggle," a poetry version of the word game Boggle (there is a version of this poem on sporkworld.org which allows new tiles, poetry fragments, to be permanently added); and (6) "The Electronic Muse," a "poetry processor" which generates random sentences using the vocabulary of various poets, allowing users to add their own lines and edit the result into a poem that is a collaboration between computer, user, and the poets whose vocabularies were mined. In addition to the six works, the menu page has a small visual/sound work based on the word "Oulipo."

(Source: Authour's description, ELC, vol. 1)

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Eric Dean Rasmussen