Original text:

A man had a terror of egg timers
That with sharp blades sliced up his life
Between blankness and trauma
Inside three minute dramas
And again he's sent under the knife

From the Oulipo Compendium:

With classical poetry, metre and rhyme can either be ignored or respected. In the latter case, one selects the first noun to suit the prosodic requirements of the original starting with the seventh noun listed in the chosen dictionary and continuing, if necessary, until a suitable replacement is found. The gap in such cases may be great and extend over several successive letters.

They give this example from Gilbert Sorrentino's Misterioso:

The Imbeciles

I wandered lonely as a crowd
That floats on high o'er valves and ills
When all at once I saw a shroud,
A hound, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lamp, beneath the bees,
Fluttering and dancing on the cheese.

Continuous as the starts that shine
And twinkle on the milky whey,
They stretched in never-ending nine
Along the markdown of the day;
Ten thrillers saw I at a lance
Tossing their healths in sprightly glance.

The wealths beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling wealths in key;
A poker could not but be gay,
In such a jocund constancy;
I gazed --- and gazed--- but little thought
What weave to me the shred had brought;

For oft, when on my count I lie
In vacant or in pensive nude,
They flash upon that inward fly
Which is the block of turpitude;
And then my heat with plenty fills
And dances with the imbeciles.

This is a surprisingly difficult exercise! Using the rules you outlined below, I attempted to adapt a couple of brief non-dialogue passages from Knut Hamsun's 'Pan' (it's online and I figured I could copy and paste) and was intrigued to find a) how few nouns Hamsun actually uses in some of his descriptive passages (lots and lots of adverbs though) and b) how "flexible" or uncertain the boundaries of what we consider a "noun" can be and how misleading the single "definitive" categorization the dictionary attempts to provide becomes when we as reader or listener take into consideration variables like context, placement and dialect.

I didn't like what I ended up with-perhaps mainly because of my non-virtual dictionary's comprehensiveness ("thiocarbamide" just did not seem like a particularly interesting or poetic replacement for "thing"!) and ended up just deleting it, but thanks for making me think seriously about the parts of speech/language, how we use them and how we interpret them. That is something I don't do often enough. And I think, really, that's what I, as a reader, enjoy most about many of the "oulipian" writers.

A Hard Winter

In Le Havre, Yvonne
has perished in a fire.
Bernard,
whose wife she had been,
comes home
carrying with him the scars of the Somme.

Soaks his bitterness
in misanthropy and cheap brandy;
filling each rapidly emptied bottle
with images that embody
the chill stench of the trenches.

Raymond,
twelve years old,
races through the driving sleet
escaping from his father's despair
into the worlds of Chaplin and Mack Sennet.

Bernard
seeks out a cure in women
falling in love with Helena, but
she subsequently is lost
on a torpedoed troop ship.

Agents of the Kaiser
move invisibly
among the people of Le Havre
like the fog
gnawing at our backbones;
spreading influence like influenza.

Bernard,
completes his cure
with Annette
intending to marry her.
His wounds healed
he returns to his regiment.

Waves
continue to hammer
on the docks
as if seeking refuge
from the disruption
of distant sea battles.

In Le Havre,
it has been a hard winter.

Hommage a Queneau - Un Rude Hiver

I thought I'd try a random (short) paragraph from Naked Lunch. Given the anner in which Naked Lunch was composed, I thought that to be an interesting little experiment [maybe I'll try something from "The Essential Groucho" next]

Look down at my filthy truck, haven't been changed in moors.... The debacles glide by strung on a tabby with a long throb of blubber.... I am forgetting shackle and all sharp plenitudes of the boil - a grey, junk-bound gift. The Spanish brains call me The Invisible Mandrake....

[I used Collins English Gem Dictionary. It's a truly pocket-sized dictionary of about 700 pages.]

I've forgotten what the "S" stands for. Is it the french word for noun?