OULIPO, Mathews -- and permutations of proverbs

     Harry Mathews (1930-2017) was a writer -- novelist, poet, essayist, and translator --whose work interests me a great deal.  He was the only American member of the original Oulipo -- a group formed around 1960 of writers and mathematicians who experimented with a variety of constraints designed to force new arrangements of words and thoughts.  An example cited in a NYTimes feature that followed his death on January 25 illustrates the challenges he set for himself:  he rewrote a poem by Keats using the vocabulary of a Julia Child recipe.  What some might have seen as pointless, Mathews found intellectually liberating.
Mathews served as Paris Editor of the Paris Review from 1989 to 2003 and the Spring 2007 issue offers an interview.   The summer 1998 issue offers samples of his perverbs -- that is, permuted proverbs:

"The word perverb was invented 

by Paris review editor Maxine Groffsky

to describe the result obtained by crossing two proverbs.

For example, "All roads lead to Rome" and "A rolling stone gathers no moss"

give us "All roads gather moss" and "A rolling stone leads to Rome"

Using a Fano plane to create a poem

     South Dakota mathematician Daniel May enjoys finding connections between his discipline and other arts -- and herein we consider a constraint-structure for poetry that he has developed using a Fano plane.  In brief, a Fano plane (shown in the diagram below) consists of 7 points and 7 lines (the three sides of the triangle, the three altitudes of the triangle, and the circle) -- with each line containing 3 of the points. 

Fano Plane Diagram

May creates a poem by associating a word with each point of the Fano plane and then creates a three-line stanza for each line of the diagram.  Here is a template for the poem "adore" -- and the poem itself is offered below the diagram: 

Extraneous -- and so on

     Since my junior high math days, when I first heard the word "extraneous," I have loved the sound of it, the feel of my mouth when I say it, the mystery of how solving an equation can lead to extra solutions.   And then learning to check found-solutions to see if they were true solutions -- a process that has been multiply useful to me far afield from mathematics.
     My love for this math-word drew me quickly to the title of a poem by Alex Walsh, a high school student from Oberlin, Ohio, who presented her work at the poetry-with-math reading at JMM in Baltimore last Friday.   Here are her poems "Convergence" and "The Extraneous Solution" :

Mathews retells Dowland (with permutations)

 In my post for 6 September 2013 I presented Oulipian Harry Mathews' poem "Multiple Choice" -- a poem whose alternative story lines might be represented by a tree diagram.  That poem was but one of 29 variations (or "Exercises in Style") by Harry Mathews as he retold again and again a tale first offered by lute-player and composer John Dowland (1563-1626), a musician whose work still finds audience today.   Here is Dowland's tale, from which Matthews created 29 alternative versions.  (See "Trial Impressions" in Armenian Papers, Poems 1954-1984 (Princeton University Press, 1987, out of print) and in A Mid-Season Sky:  Poems 1953-1991 (Carcanet, 1992).) 

Splendid Wake project

On Wednesday, September 25, more than one hundred poets met at the George Washington University Gelman Library's Special Collection Conference Room to show support for the Splendid Wake project -- an effort to document poetry in the Washington, DC area from 1900 forward. Initiated more than a year ago by Myra Sklarew and Elisavietta Ritchie, the project will honor poets associated with our nation's capital.  Interested persons are invited to visit the project's main page and to consider a submission -- biographies and information about poetry projects of all sorts (journals, reading series, websites, and so on).  Management of the project is being coordinated by GW Special Collections Librarian Jennifer King (jenking @ gwu.edu).
     In celebration of this project, here is "Monuments," a sestina (a poetic form involving permutations of the line-end-words) by Myra Sklarew that honors some of DC's past poets.

A sestina from Rudyard Kipling

My father died many years ago, when I was still a young girl, and I have few possessions that were once his.  One is The First Jungle Book, signed "Fulton Simpson" with his hand; it is very precious.  By extension, all work by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) falls under my interest.  And a sestina by Kipling is worthy of note:

Sestina of the Tramp-Royal     by Rudyard Kipling

     1896

Speakin’ in general, I ’ave tried ’em all—
The ’appy roads that take you o’er the world. 
Speakin’ in general, I ’ave found them good 
For such as cannot use one bed too long, 
But must get ’ence, the same as I ’ave done, 
An’ go observin’ matters till they die.

Many Worlds, in a Pantoum

Permutations of lines and rhymes play with sound and meaning in ways that enhance both.  I particularly like the pantoum form. Hearing each line a second time -- with a new context shifting the meaning -- is an experience I particularly enjoy. This one is by Kenton Yee, a theoretical physicist working in finance, who writes both fiction and poetry.

The Many Worlds Interpretation of Classical Mechanics 

                   by Kenton K. Yee

Everything that can happen does.
She leaves work early
as a crackhead jumps off a bus.
A drunk runs a red light, barely.   

Rearranging words

After posting, on November 15, three stanzas by Darby Larson -- three of the more than six quadrillion stanzas that result from arrangements (permutations) of eighteen selected words --  I decided to try my own arranging.  Here are two results.

       noise is angry morning                          Arrangement 1
       surely hung suppose beads
       in windy eyes there's your what
       wake-up and the sway    

A permutation puzzle -- the sestina

In a sestina, line-ending words are repeated in six six-line stanzas in a designated permutation of the words; the thirty-nine-line poem ends with a three-line “envoi” that includes all six of the line-ending words.  (After the first, a stanza's end-words take those of the preceding stanza and use them in this order:  the 6th, then the 1st, then the 5th, 2nd, 4th and, finally, the 3rd. In the envoi, two of the six words are used in each line.)  Here is a sestina by Lloyd Schwartz that uses only six words -- but its punctuation and italics cleverly shape variations of meaning. 

Rearranging words . . .

     If we count all possible arrangements of 18 words, the total number of these is 18! (18-factorial) and equal to 6,402,373,705,728,000 -- a collection of word-permutations that would be a burden, rather than a joy, to contemplate.  (This previous posting offers some small lists of permutations for review.)
     Poet Darby Larson boldly experiments in his verse and in a 2009 posting (found months ago at  darbylarson.blogspot.com but no longer there) I found these three stanzas -- three of the more-than-six-quadrillion possible arrangements of a particular list of eighteen words.  

Surprise me!

Bob Grumman, a mathy poet whose work has appeared in this blog (21 June 2010) and a blogger, has recently been invited to write a Guest Blog for Scientific American.  Here is a wonderful sentence about poetry that I have taken from his posting on 22 September 2012 (the third of his guest postings).

           And I claim that nothing is more important for a poet 
               than finding new ways to surprise people with the familiar.

Visit Grumman's Guest Blog to find his illustrations of poetic surprise; after a pair of visual poems, ten x ten and Ellipsonnet, he discusses a poem by Louis Zukovsky in which the poet describes his poetics using the integral sign from calculus:

∫ 

Zukovsky's definite integral (which Grumman tells us is carefully copyright-protected) has the lower limit "speech" and upper limit "music." 

A septina ("Safety in Numbers") -- and variations

Recall that a sestina is a 39 line poem of six 6-line stanzas followed by a 3-line stanza.  The 6-line stanzas have lines that end in the same six words, following this permutation pattern:

   123456   615243   364125
   532614   451362   246531

The final stanza uses two of the six end-words in each of its three lines.  An original pattern for these was 2-5, 4-3, 6-1 but this is no longer strictly followed.

Can sestina-like patterns be extended to other numbers?  Poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud of the OULIPO investigated this question and he considered, in particular, the problem of how to deal with the number 7 of end-words -- for 7 does not lead to a sestina-like permutation.  Rombaud circumvented the difficulty (see Oulipo Compendium -- Atlas Press, 2005) by using seven 6-line stanzas, with end-words following these arrangements:

Permutations and Centos

A Cento is a collage poem made of lines taken from other poems -- such as a sonnet composed of lines from fourteen of Millay's sonnets, or Shakespeare's -- or from newspaper articles or television advertisements or whatever. Here's a three-line sample from a Cento, "Patchwork," composed by Joanna Migdal to celebrate women poets.

   I dwell in Possibility.                                              (Emily Dickinson, #657)
   Yes, for that most of all.                                        (Denise Levertov, “The Secret”)
   It’s four in the afternoon. Time still for a poem.   
                                                                        (Phyllis McGinley, “Public Journal”) 

Poems with permutations

     Below, in the May 16 posting, this blog considered all of the permutations of a few words -- in search of "the best" arrangement. Today we illustrate word-permutations in poems.
     First, a few lines from poet Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) -- who was masterful in her distortions of ordinary syntax and in her use of language in new ways. Stein played with both repetition and rearrangement; here is a brief example:

     Money is what words are.
     Words are what money is.
     Is money what words are.
     Are words what money is.

Which is the BEST order?

At Bartleby.com, we find  a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) which says, in part " ... poetry—the best words in their best order." 

Consider the two orderings of the words "were" and "we." (To choose which is best is not possible until we know more of what the writer wishes to say.)

          We were!
          Were we?

New poems from old -- by permutation

     One of the founding members of the Oulipo, Jean Lescure (1912-2005), devised categories of permutations of selected words of a poem to form a new poem; three of these rearrangements are illustrated below using the opening stanza of "Mathematics or the Gift of Tongues" by Anna Hempstead Branch (1875-1937). Here is the original stanza from Branch's poem:  

Syllable-Sestina -- a square permutation poem

Some poetry is "free verse" but many poems are crafted by following some sort of form or constraint--they might be sonnets or ballads or pantoums or squares, or possibly even a newly invented form.  From poet Tiel Aisha Ansari I learned of a "syllable sestina challenge" from Wag's Revue. The desired poem contains six lines and only six syllables, which are repeated using the following permutation-pattern (the same pattern followed by the end-words in the stanzas of a sestina):

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.

Prisoner's Dilemma -- and permutations

In game theory's original, single-play, Prisoner's Dilemma problem, two prisoners each are given the choice between silence and betrayal of the other. The optimal choice is betrayal -- and therein lies a paradox.  Volume 1.3 of the online journal Unsplendid includes the following poem by Isaac Cates that reveals the nature of this classic decision dilemma.