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"

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:

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 Mathews 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).) 

Snowballs -- growing/shrinking lines

Today's post explores poetic structures called snowballs developed by the Oulipo (see also March 25 posting) and known to many through the writings of Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner (1914-2010).  TIME Magazine's issue for January 10, 1977 had an article entitled "Science:  Perverbs and Snowballs" that celebrated both Gardner and the inventive structures of the Oulipo. Oulipian Harry Mathews' "Liminal Poem" (to the right) is a snowball (growing and then melting) dedicated to Gardner.  The lines in Mathew's poem increase or decrease by one letter from line to line.   Below left, a poem by John Newman illustrates the growth-only snowball.

Mathematical structure and Multiple choice

     A sonnet repeats the iambic rhythm of the heart beat (da-DUM, da-DUM, . . .) with a line length corresponding to a typical breath (5 heartbeats); it thus seems easy to internalize the numerical structure that guides such a poem. 
     A decision tree offers a very different choice of mathematical structure for a poem -- displaying for a reader different choices among stanzas.  Originally proposed to the OULIPO by founder Francois Le Lionnais, and referred to as a multiple-choice narrative, such a structure allows readers of a poem to choose among subsequent events. Instead of reading the poem vertically, we may jump about, choosing the sequence we want to read.

In April, Celebrate BOTH Mathematics and Poetry

           In the United States, April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month.  Visits to the links in the preceding sentence will offer lots of information about these monthly celebrations (as will exploring this blog).  AND, below I offer a poetic celebration of mathematics.

     American poet Harry Mathews (1950-2017) was a member of OULIPO and divided his time between New York and Paris; much of his work moved outside the restrictions of traditional poetic forms.

     Here are the opening lines of his poem,  "Safety in Numbers":

from    Safety in Numbers     by Harry Mathews

     The enthusiasm with which I repeatedly declare you my one
     And only confirms the fact that we are indeed two,
     Not one; nor can anything we do ever let us feel three
     (And this is no lisp-like alteration: it's four
     That's a crowd, not a trinity), and our five
     Fingers and toes multiplied leave us at six-

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.

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:  

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.

Playing with permutations of the nouns of a poem

     Founded in 1960, OULIPO  (short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) has been active in the exploration of the effects of constraints or arbitrary rules  in the production of literature.  
          Developed in the 13th century, the sonnet 
                   (with 14 lines, 10 syllables per line and a prescribed rhyme scheme) 
                       is a well-known member of these "constrained" forms.  The Haiku is another.
     Published in 2005, the Oulipo Compendium, Revised and Updated (edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brioche, Make Now Press, Los Angeles) contains definitions and examples of a large variety of rule-following writing.  On page 173 we find some interesting comments about language by French poet Jean Lescure (1912-2005):
     " . . . Lescure remarks that we frequently have the impression 
          that language in itself  'has something to say' and that nowhere 
          is this impression more evident than in its possibilities for permutation.  
          They are enough to teach us that to listen we must be silent; 
          enough to transform a well-oiled bicycle into a well-boiled icicle."