A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems

 Celebrate Raymond Queneau (1903-1976).

     In a recent posting, mathy blogger Ben Orlin noted (here in Math with Bad Drawings)  that 2021 is the 60th anniversary of an amazing poetry collection, One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, by Raymond Queneau.  The collection consist of 14 sonnets, with each line of each sonnet on a separate strip of paper -- allowing formation of a poem using any of the 14 first lines, any of the 14 second lines, and so on.  Here is an link to a earlier blog posting that introduces Queneau's collection and includes and interactive way to create a sonnet from the collection.

Here is a link to other postings from this blog that include Queneau.

Which permutation of lines yields the best poem?

     A fascinating article about poet Jericho Brown (by Allison Glock in Garden and Gun magazine) reminded me of the vital role of line-arrangement in creating a poem.  (Emory University professor Brown has won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection The Tradition  (Copper Canyon Press, 2019)).
      Glock's article, "Jericho Rising," tells of various factors that have influenced Brown's poetry and describes his process of arranging lines, typed on separate strips of paper, into poems.  Three of the lines shown in the article are:

       What is the history of the wound? 

  We'll never see their faces or know their names.      

       And a grief so thick you could touch it.

Celebrate Constraints -- Happy Birthday, OULIPO

Patrick Bahls and Richard Chess of the University of North Carolina at Ashville have organized a "Conference on Constrained Poetry" to be held on November 19-20 in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of OULIPO (short for French: OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle), founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns that may be used by writers in any way they enjoy." Constraints are used to trigger new ideas and the Oulipo group is an ongoing source of novel techniques, often based on mathematical ideas -- such as counting letters and syllables, substitution algorithms,  permutations, palindromes, and even chess problems.

Queneau and the Oulipo

Raymond Queneau was one of the leaders of a group of ten--primarily writers and mathematicians, primarily French--who founded a group, "Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle" ("Workshop of Potential Literature"), that eventually became known as the Oulipo. Queneau described potential literature as "the search for new forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit."