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As part of Wordplay Week on the Bleader, we announced a contest based on an Oulipian-style exercise. If you’ve been paying attention like you should, you know that “oulipian” refers to the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (“workshop for potential literature”), a club founded in Paris in 1960 and dedicated to investigating language from a structuralist point of view. Members created texts according to conceits of their own devising: a novel without the letter “e”; a poem that’s reconstituted by systematically substituting new nouns for the originals; a book of ten sonnets in which each line appears on a separate strip of paper, allowing—according to the book’s title—for a “hundred thousand billion” possible poems.
We got brilliant in-house responses from Steve Bogira, Mike Miner, and Sam Worley. Contest submissions ranged from the raunchy to the sly and (sort of) sweet. The winner, who will receive our sincere wishes for the best weekend ever, is . . .
