I once used the OuLiPo N+7 technique on some W.S. Merwin poems. It improved them greatly, probably because the lexicon he used was so predictable in the first place. I also did another subtitution exercise in which I simply wrote down a list of nouns at random and replaced Merwin's nouns with my own.

Why did not Bloom in his book on "geniuses" choose a single eccentric genius like Raymond Roussel? Even Jules Verne would have been a better choice than Tennyson.

I had my translation course translate a short Spanish poem using the Lipogram method: omitting the the letter "e" from their translations. The students were quite successful. Know my only task is the explain to them why I made them do it. Could I blog for a day with this letter?