The OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de Littérature
Potentielle, was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau (above, avec chien) and François Le Lionnais.
The group's initiatory text was a sequence of ten sonnets written by Queneau
entitled Cent mille milliards de poèmes:
these sonnets all use the same rhymes, and are grammatically constructed so
that any line in any sonnet can be replaced by the corresponding line in any of
the other nine sonnets. Each sonnet in the original edition was cut into 14
strips, enabling the curious reader to construct a poem which began, say, with
line 1 from sonnet 7, took its line 2 from sonnet 3, its line 3 from sonnet 10,
and so on. This novel procedure allowed Queneau's 140 lines to generate,
potentially, 100 million million (10 14) poems, which would take, he later
calculated, someone reading 24 hours a day around 190,258,751 years to peruse
in their entirety. And who has that kind of time?
