Location: This week we’ll meet at 4pm at Poets House, 10 River Terrace, Manhattan, with Library Director John Vincler and Archivist Lea Osborne.  

Agenda: This week’s title references Paul Klee’s description of drawing as taking “a line for a walk… for a walk’s sake”; for our lesson today, that line might refer to a line of text or code, a row of books, a pathway of perambulation, a city street, a border, and so forth. We’ll explore poetic, experimental means of discovery — on the page, in the stacks, around the city, and in performances that animate these multi-scalar realms. We’ll also consider the generative potential of limits, rules, and restrictions. For our first hour, John Vincler and Lea Osborne will lead us on an exploration of Poets House and their new catalog and digital asset management system; then Lea will join us in an exercise of oulipian exploration and aleatory (chance-based) composition. [Update: here's our zine!]  

Looking Ahead: Our own Xinan Ran is hosting a Fate & Fortune Walking Tour of Chinatown with artist Alex Wolfe in April. More info to come!

To Prepare for This Week:

• Explore the Poets House website, read about its library, and explore their new catalog (scheduled for launch in late February!)
• Read John Vincler on his own and other poets’ modes of exploration: “A Private Literature,” The Paris Review (January 11, 2018). 
• To begin thinking about the exploratory possibilities of rules and constraints, let’s revisit the fun-and-geneative-but-sometimes-gimmicky-and-very-male literary movement, OuLiPo, by reading Gabriela Denise Frank, “Grave Unseriousness: Experimenting with Oulipo Constraints,” Poetry Foundation (February 28, 2024). 
  • Optional: Skim Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (originally published 1947), available in part on Monoskop (this book blew my mind during my sophomore-year Stylistics class!). 
• Now, let’s think about translating such exploratory methods to other realms, at other scales. First, the stacks: Read Alexander Chee, “Bibliomancy for the Living Autobiography in the Third Person,” The Querent (September 23, 2023) [it’s a Substack post, unfortunately; so here’s a pdf]. 
  • And let’s consider how we might mediate these experiences through tools and instruments. Read “The Dynamic Order of the Art Library,” Sitterwerk Journal (n.d.) — and skim through Sitterwerk’s archive of events and projects to see how they’ve continually reimagined library discovery through new technologies and critical questions. 
  • Optional: We might also imagine the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new East Storehouse as another “stack” or “analog database” that invites serendipitous discovery. Read Will Jennings, with David Allin and Brendan Cormier, “A Conversation About V&A Storehouse,” The Recess (September 1, 2025). 
• Thinking at city-scale, we could look to the Situationists and psychogeographers. I encourage you to briefly introduce yourselves to both movements, if you’re not already familiar. Let’s also consider the walking tour (skim this Arena channel) and scavenger hunt (skim this channel, too) as pedagogical methods and creative forms. We might choose to curate a tour or hunt as our final collaborative project.  

Supplemental Resources:

• Chris Andrews, How To Do Things With Forms: The Oulipo and its Inventions (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022). 
• Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012). 
• David Bellos, "Perec in the Lab" in Georges Perec: A Life in Words (Godine, 1994) [on Perec's work as an archivist in a medical research lab — thanks, Simi!].
• Louis Boero, “Ouipo and the Creativity of Limitation,” Tetragrammaton (April 3, 2025). 
• Mónica de la Torre, “Into the Maze: OULIPO,” Poets.org (January 30, 2005). 
• Gariela Denise Frank, “Oulipian Experiments in Generative Writing,” Workshop, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology (June 29-30, 2026). 
• Caite Dolan-Leach, “Language Games,” The Paris Review (February 23, 2017). 
• Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito, “An Attempt at Exhausting a Movement,” The New Inquiry (January 17, 2013); The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement (ZerO Books, 2012). 
• Hannah Frishberg, “Coincidence and Community: NYC’s Association Association Delights in Connections,” Gothamist (August 13, 2025); see also the Association Association. 
• Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Michigan Press, 1997); see also this transcript of Glissant’s conversation with Derek Walcott (n.b.!) at Poets House in 1991, as well as this spring Glissant-inspired exhibition at CARA here in NY :)
• Emiel Heijnen and Melissa Bremmer, eds., Wicked Arts Assignments: Practicing Creativity in Contemporary Arts Education (Valiz, 2021). 
• Will Jennings, with David Allin and Brendan Cormier, “A Conversation About V&A Storehouse,” The Recess (September 1, 2025). 
• Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (Praeger, 1953). 
• Michael Leong, “Rats Build Their Labyrinth: Oulipo in the 21st Century,” Hyperallergic (May 17, 2015). 
• Valeria Luiselli, “Collected Poems,” The New Yorker (December 9, 2014); this piece addresses Luiselli’s residency at Poets House, during which she and I were in dialogue on October 14, 2014). 
• Harry Matthews and Alistair Brotchie, eds., Oulipo Compendium (Make Now Press, 2005). 
• Ian Monk and Daniel Levin Becker, eds., All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo, 1963-2018 (McSweeney’s Publishing, 2018). 
• Joseph Nechvatal, “The Oulipo Group’s Generative Word Games,” Hyperallergic (January 6, 2015). 
• Nina Paim, Taking a Line for a Talk: Assignments in Design Education (Spector Books, 2021). 
• Lara Palmquist, “The Formal Imagination of Oulipo,” Ploughshares (March 8, 2015). 
• Paper Monument, ed., Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment (Paper Monument, 2012). 
• Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Wakefield Press, 2010).
• Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style, trans. Barbara Wright (New Directions, 1981); originally published in French, 1947. 
• A. Gray Read, “OuLiPo, Architecture, and the Practice of Creative Constraint,” 86th ASCA Annual Meeting and Technology Conference (1998). 
• Ariane Roth, ed., The Dynamic Library: Organizing Knowledge at the Sitterwerk - Precedents and Possibilities (Soberscove Press, 2015). 
• Daniel Scott Snelson, “Contingent Reading; A Poetics of the Search,” ASAP/Journal 7:2 (May 2022): 385-407. 
• Marc Treib, “Taking a Line for a Walk: Path, Movement, and View,” Landscape Journal 44:2 (2025): 129-45.