Paris Oulipo president Paul Fournel and fellow member Hervé Le Tellier are joined by San Francisco Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker, and Seattle poet Doug Nufer, who will read or otherwise perform their own oulipian texts as well as highlights from the workshop's first half century. This event is day two of a three day long Oulipo Laboratory coproduced by City Lights, the Mechanics' Institute, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Since the early 1960s, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle — Workshop of Potential Literature, or OuLiPo — has been borrowing mathematical and scientific theories to develop new structures for literary creation. In its explorations, the workshop has both rejuvenated age-old forms, such as the sonnet, sestina, and lipogram, and created new delights like the subway poem, the N+7 technique, and the first choose-your-own-adventure fiction in history. This evening, Hervé Le Tellier will also deliver a reading from his new book Electro W, published by Other Press. Opening statements by Peter Maravelis of City Lights Booksellers.
For more info and festival schedule, visit the Subtle Channels Tumblr.
Speaker Bios
Paul Fournel is a writer. He spent several years as a publisher at Ramsay and Seghers, among others; he has also been president of the Society of Men of Letters of France, served as a cultural attaché in London and in Cairo, and directed the Alliance Française in San Francisco. Now he is a full-time writer, a full-time cyclist, and full-time president of the Oulipo.
Hervé Le Tellier is a writer, journalist, mathematician, food critic, and teacher. He is a daily contributor to the website of Le Monde and one of the personalities on the radio quiz show Les Papous dans la tête; he has been a member of the Oulipo since 1992. His published works in English include Electrico W (Other Press, 2013), Enough About Love (Other Press, 2011), The Sextine Chapel (Dalkey, 2011), and A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies) (Dalkey, 2011).
Daniel Levin Becker is reviews editor of The Believer, the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard, 2012), the translator of Georges Perec's La Boutique Obscure (Melville House, 2013), and the youngest member of the Oulipo. He lives in San Francisco.
Doug Nufer is the author of more than half a dozen novels and three books of poetry, all of which employ Oulipian methods. The poetry collection We Were Werewolves (Make Now, 2008) and the novels Never Again (Black Square, 2004), Negativeland (Autonomedia, 2004), and By Kelman Out of Pessoa (Les Figues, 2011) are the most constraint-driven of these books. He’s also responsible for a lounge act, Lounge Acts (Insert Blanc, 2013) a conceptual poetry/music recording and chapbook, and The Dammed, a geographic homophonic narrative poem he wrote and performs, on stage and in a movie by Amy Billharz. He lives in Seattle, where he runs a wine shop.
Rachel Galvin is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Humanities Center of Johns Hopkins University. Her poems and translations appear in journals including Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, and the New Yorker. She is the author of the poetry collections Zoetrope, Pulleys & Locomotion, and Lost Property Unit. Most recently, Hitting the Streets, her translation of Raymond Queneau’s Courir les rues, was published by Carcanet Press.