Poetry Games: The Poetics of Procedure & Constraint, a workshop with Rachel Galvin—May 11, 2024

In this poetry workshop, we will try out some techniques that can help make the blank page a little less blank. We will experiment with a variety of constraints and procedures that may include creative translations; re-writing; erasures; collages; a selection of stimulating Oulipian constraints (e.g. only using certain letters or writing three versions of the same poem, etc.). “Oulipo” is a French acronym that stands for Workshop or Sewing Circle of Potential Literature. This group of international writers and mathematicians founded in 1960—and which still thrives today—was famously described by Raymond Queneau as « Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape. » The group’s aim is to use constraints and procedures to create new literary forms. In a similar spirit of playful experiment, we will generate new drafts together during this workshop, while discussing topics including inspiration, authorship, form, and copying and plagiarism.

Rachel Galvin's newest book of poems, Uterotopia, is just out from Persea Books in 2023. Galvin is the author of Elevated Threat Level, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Pulleys & Locomotion. She is the translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets, winner of the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize, and co-translator of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poetry, a finalist for the National Translation Award. Her current translation project is supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work appears in journals and anthologies including Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best American Poetry 2020, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, McSweeney’s, The Nation, the New Yorker, and Ploughshares, Plume, and Poetry. She is a co-founder of Outranspo, a creative translation collective (outranspo.com), and teaches at the University of Chicago.