There was an old letterpress in my classroom, needed a lot of work, not functional. Around it lie boxes and boxes of loose metal type. Random grabs off of ebay and some donated with the broken machine. I have had experience printing with the press before, when I was working in a printshop in Portland, so I had some students help me clean and organize the materials and in-between classes I would work on a little here, a little there. Sometimes I'd take the letters and spell them out into poetic phrases and being I only had a limited set available at a given time, the limitation forced me into different word choices and rhymes. This method of writing through a process is very similar to the approaches of writing games and techniques that the Surrealists and afterwards the Oulipo Literature Group employed.
The Cut Up Technique, N+7, Oulipo
