Taking a Line for a Walk: Poetic Discovery

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!]  

To Prepare for Today

• 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.  

Fieldwork Documentation