Eunoia and Oulipo

I find the readings for today fascinating. Though they go against my personal Romantic notion of poetry as an organic process, they are incontestably works of great effort and skill, and I am very glad to be exposed to them. When I started reading the definitions and history of Oulipo, I wasn't sure if it was just some satire about poetry, some elaborate joke, or if I was actually learning about a form. I was even a little suprised to discover that I was, in fact, reading about a legitimate form. I see the value and whimsical creativity to the N + 7 form, although it did leave me wondering: does one write their own creative work and then replace the nouns, or do they steal a previous writer's work and replace the nouns? Or both? I feel like that form requires the use of a very small dictionary, because otherwise the danger of losing coherency is simply too great.
Eunoia is quite impressive. I had heard of such things before (the long, long novel that never once contains the vowel "e"- I forget the title), but hadn't given it enough thought to realize the lengths to which people might extend the constraints. It is (in the most literal and basic sense of the word) awesome that Christian Bok managed to write decent length chapters eliminating all vowels but one. I was stunned when I read about all the additional constraints he assigned himself in creating Eunoia. That said, so many words with only one vowel becomes a bit tedious to read after a while- and the vocabulary is so high that it took a lot of concentration and careful reading to understand the flow of topics.
Probably my favorite pieces for today were Jen Bervin's altered versions of the Shakespeare sonnets. The concise statements that she drew from each sonnet were extremely poignant, and by juxtaposing those statements with the original piece, she caught my interest further. I would probably be most interested in that technique, or maybe N + 7 with an extremely small dictionary. These Contemporary and Modern forms are definitely fascinating.