the choice of mathematics, arguably in fundamental opposition to po-
etry, is any thing but haphazard.)And there follows the well-known Oulipo “law”: “A text written according
to a constraint describes the constraint.”^3
According to Oulipo rules, there are as many possible constraints as there
are poems, and the constraint is not an external form that is readily recog-
nized but may be a rule that remains largely hidden to the reader. Whereas
a Petrarchan sonnet may be understood as a kind of envelope (octave plus
sestet), whose parameters govern the poem’s composition, the Oulipo con-
straint is a generative device: it creates a formal structure whose rules of com-
position are internalized so that the constraint in question is not only a rule
but a thematic property of the poem as well.
Consider Michel Bénabou’s 1986 assemblage of perverses, lines obtained
by splitting two familiar lines of poetry and crossing them (see Oulipo Com-
pendium 78). Titled “Alexandre au greffoir” (“Alexander Transplanted”), it
appeared as #29 in La Bibliothèque Oulipienne and is dedicated to “Jacques
Roubaud / qui ressemble à Baudelaire / et rime avec Rimbaud.”^4 In his head-
note Bénabou notes that however monotonous the alexandrine may have be-
come in its recent incarnations, it remains the verse form that gave France
its golden age of poetry, the cornerstone of its metric, perhaps because its
rules are so very strict. Accordingly, with Roubaud’s help, Bénabou sets out
to give the alexandrine new life. Their project has two stages: (1) to make
a list of all the alexandrines they know by heart, which are thus part of
their everyday lives, and (2) to liberate the hemistichs by separating and re-
combining them, thus producing a whole new set of alexandrines. The latter
process produces a sizable body of perverses. Bénabou’s list has 260 alexan-
drines, each one divided into hemistichs and printed in two columns. The
source texts are then re-formed into single aphoristic lines, couplets, qua-
trains, and whole poems. Here for example is the ¤rst quatrain of a poem
called “Les Chats”:
Les amoureux fervents des ®euves impassibles
Aiment également, à l’ombre des forêts,
Les chats puissants et doux comme des chairs d’enfants
Qui comme eux sont frileux dans les froides ténèbres.^5The source text is Baudelaire’s “Les Chats”:
Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères
Aiment également, dans leur mûre saison,208 Chapter 11