The Small Box
The Oulipo site posts a constraint of the month. This month, it's <<petite boîte>>
A "small box" has six lines with syllable counts of 7 7 8 ? 8 7. Line 4 consists of a single word, the word put in the "box." The lines don't rhyme and form a single sentence. And those lines cannot contain any words in the same grammatical category as the word in line 4. That is, if line 4 is a noun, it's the only noun in the poem.
It should be interesting to see how well it works in English. Maybe the syllable counts should be converted to feet (3 3 4 ? 4 3) given the different metrical systems. Or not.
A "small box" has six lines with syllable counts of 7 7 8 ? 8 7. Line 4 consists of a single word, the word put in the "box." The lines don't rhyme and form a single sentence. And those lines cannot contain any words in the same grammatical category as the word in line 4. That is, if line 4 is a noun, it's the only noun in the poem.
It should be interesting to see how well it works in English. Maybe the syllable counts should be converted to feet (3 3 4 ? 4 3) given the different metrical systems. Or not.
posted by The Sublibrarian at 01:41
1 Comments:
This is really interesting. I wish I were better at reading French.
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