Word Pirates

This morning, I was reading about Oulipo, a French school of poetry that tried to find new structures and patterns for poetry. Some examples:

Queneau’s Exercices de Style (Exercises in Style), in which he tells the same simple story ninety-nine times, each in a different style.

“Singular Pleasures” by Harry Mathews (the only American member of Oulipo) describes 61 different scenes, each told in a different style (generally poetic, elaborate, or circumlocutory) in which 61 different people (all of different ages, nationalities, and walks of life) masturbate.

Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) is inspired by children’s picture books in which each page is cut into horizontal strips which can be turned independently, allowing different pictures (usually of people) to be combined in many ways. Queneau applies this technique to poetry: the book contains 10 sonnets, each on a page. Each page is split into 14 strips, one for each line. The author estimates in the introductory explanation that it would take approximately 200 million years to read all possible combinations.

Pretty cool stuff. How can it be applied to the short story?
~ Joy