The Abstract of the Creative Writing Capstone Project

Abstract

An exploration and critique of aleatoric approaches in the creative process, using language experiments as an umbrella term to explore & discuss chance operations, Oulipo techniques, Surrealist exercises and Charles Bernstein’s 66 experiments, which are heavily borrowed from Bernadette Mayer's processes. This research examines whether language experiments are really just a matter of chance. Why do we call them language experiments (and not language games?). How do contemporary poets approach language experiments differently than the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, Oulipo, or Surrealist poets? How are language experiments (erasure, homolinguistic translation, exquisite corpse, abecedarian, acrostic) and traditional forms (sonnet, sestina, villanelle) dissimilar? This paper seeks to explore the ways in which the very essence of what makes a poem a poem is choice.