Flarf, with its Google-sculpting, often feels like a rough-edged street version of Oulipo. Uncreative Writing, which tries to squeeze everything beyond typing out of literature itself, often feels like Oulipo turned sideways. So why not think out Oulipo proper, card-carrying Oulipo? Not just Oulipo the idea, but the actual workshop for potential literature that has been ongoing now for some 46 years in & about Paris. I have no idea why I didn’t scoop up Oulipo Compendium the instant it first was published by Atlas Press in 1998, but I didn’t. Maybe it cost too much or, more likely, given that Atlas is a British press, I just never saw a copy. But I didn’t make the same mistake with the new revised & updated version now jointly published by Atlas and Make Now Press.

This is essentially a 333-page encyclopedia of all things Oulipo, including a marvelous introduction by Jacques Roubaud, a new translation of Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, the work that originally precipitated the formation of Oulipo in 1960, followed by multiple alphabetical encyclopedias, a large one for Oulipo proper, then shorter ones for Oulipo outgrowths: Oulipopo, whose focus has been detective fiction; Oupeinpo, where the focus has expanded from painting to the whole of visual arts; and Ou-x-pos, where the x stands for whatever field one is interested in, from architecture to comic strips.

Not unlike the novel Hopscotch by the Belgian-born Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, a sympathizer if not an actual member of Oulipo¹, which can be read two ways, one front to back, the other jumping around to chapters designated at the end of each chapter (although, if one does, one skips a certain key chapter & is never told this), Oulipo Compendium has no index because it is all index, but with a hundred thousand billion cross references. Each term that discussed or defined is marked, every time it occurs elsewhere, with a symbol (circle for Oulipo, triangle for Oulipopo, square for Oupeinpo, star for Ou-x-pos) pointing to its placement in the work. This gives the text the look of small pox, perhaps, but is vital for bouncing back & forth, which is exactly what this work envisions a reader doing.

Because Queneau had been a surrealist & Oulipo’s methodology includes formal group membership – something no literary tendency has ever tried in the fractious U.S.2 – the relation between the two groups has always made sense to me. But Roubaud’s introduction invokes a second group as well, the modernist mathematicians who published anonymously & collectively as Nicolas Bourbaki, and who attempted a systematic presentation of mathematics constructed around set theory. This in some ways makes even more sense, and the presentation here by Harry Mathews & Alistair Brotchie underscores why being a formal organization, however welcoming & open-ended, has been of such great value to Oulipoians in general. They not only hold meetings, they take minutes, several of which are reproduced here. And while there has been a gradual lessening of formality – the minutes from the 1990s are relatively short, those from the 1960s go on for pages – the real key here is not the formal structure, but the requirement of actually meeting face to face on a regular basis. If flarf is the poetry the web begot, Oulipo is an expression of what is possible in country that is centralized around a single major metropolitan area.

Poets have of course been playing games for decades, some more serious than others. There is a poem in my very first book, Crow, that came out of a card game I worked up one day with David Melnick & Rochelle Nameroff. Using a deck of “power words,” a concept we’d stolen from Michael McClure, we played what amounted to a version of rummy, adding and discarding cards until one had a seven word line that the other two would concede was “best.” Conceding, I recall, was the hard part. The one time we played this, the one hand I won with was

what high lurking hornets buick the moose

The use of systems intersect with language poetry, inspired more directly by the presence of Jackson Mac Low than by Oulipo proper. Language poetry replicated Oulipo’s insistence on mutual influence and it was never accidental that, with just one exception, the poets in In the American Tree could all be traced one of three cities. But America has never had a single center in the same way that Paris is to France – tho one might wonder what the fact of New York’s role as an economic center has meant not just to language poetry, but to the New York School & even the Beats & Objectivists, as well as noting that langpo’s two other centers, DC & San Francisco, also function as alternative centers in a nation that spans 3,000 miles east to west. Langpo always caught flak from other poets because it was felt to be exclusive, but just imagine what would have happened had it, like Oulipo, required members to elected.

Flarf, on the other hand, is the closest thing we have had to a movement without a geographic center (although it has a concentration in New York that should raise eyebrows in North Carolina, Oregon, Providence & elsewhere). Is it an erasure of geography & personal influence or the globalization of same? Certainly, if one watches the listservs, there are strong feelings of possession & exclusion bubbling up around it as well.

Which brings me to one other question that the Compendium raises, that of diversity. While there have been women members of Oulipo – Anne Garréta, Michéle Mètail, Juliette Raabe – this volume makes Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, with four women among its 44 contributors, seem like Our Bodies, Our Selves. People of color simply are not present. In part, this is no doubt an effect of the time & place within which Oulipo arose. But you would have thought that over the past 45 years some things might have changed. Not here.

 

¹ Cortázar never appears in the Compendium.

² One possible exception might be the group of surrealists around Franklin Rosemont in Chicago.