I’d Rather an Absence of E than an Absence of U

Oulipo poetry is a literary style not often talked about. In fact, the word style itself misguides what oulipo is all about – it is a method – an engineering of writing. It forces writers to discover what they can do with language under the pressure of manufactured rules and constraints.  

It comes from the French group Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (workshop of potential literature), in which poetry, and other types of literature, is created under deliberate constraints of rules, patterns, and mathematical structures that limit how a text can be written.  

Oulipo intends to force writers out of their creative-comfort bubbles and into a world of forced, new and unexpected creativity that would have otherwise never surfaced if not for the restriction imposed by this method. 

The poem above is a lipogram: a piece of writing that completely excludes one or more letter – in this case the letter E. 

It is also a calligram – which is not inherently Oulipian – but a form of visual poetry, in which shape is used to reflect the text of the poem or add meaning.  

In the case of my poem, the shape reflects what the Oulipo rules prohibit from being written: a glass of wine.