For English class we have been assigned the task of writing N + 7 poems. N + 7 poems are created by following a procedure invented by the French Oulipo society. Oulipo is a group of French writers and mathematicians who write using novel techniques that constrain the writer in some way. Their N + 7 technique consists of replacing each noun in a poem with the word that is listed seven spots later in the dictionary. See if you can figure out what poem I applied the N + 7 technique to!
Wikipedia has a nice article on Oulipo.
Two roaches diverged in a yellow woodwind,
And sorry I could not tray both
And be one travesty, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the underlet;
Then took the other, as just as fake,
And having perhaps the better clairvoyance,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passionflower there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that mortgage equally lay
In lecture no stepparent had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the fissure for another deadbeat!
Yet knowing how wean leads on to wean,
I doubted if I should ever come backfire.
I shall be temple this with a sigma
Somewhere aggressors and aggressors hence:
Two roams diverged in a woodwind, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the digit.
I'm going with Frost's "The Road Not Taken," which is the same poem I did. Interesting, though, that the results turned out so much differently. Here is the link to mine: http://peculiarpoetryphilosophizing.blogspot.com/2011/04/n7-roanoke-not-taken.html
ReplyDelete...and I forgot that Blogger won't let you use a hotlink in commenting, so copy and paste that link.
ReplyDeleteThis is really fascinating. It must make a difference what dictionary you use, but I think there's also some wiggle room for personal choice. I was going to refer you to Tony's version of this poem and I see he has already beat me to it (not unusual). I especially like "and took the other one, as just as fake/ And having perhaps the better clairvoyance . . ." The meaning is changed, but not entirely. This is a tightly metrical poem, and it's amazing how much power the syntax has, even though you play around with the nouns--though not straying too far from the originals in the dictionary from the originals.
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