Two machines that write
Where this idea comes from
A poem machine made of strips
In 1961 the French writer Raymond Queneau published Cent mille milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems): ten sonnets of fourteen lines, printed on a book whose pages are cut into strips, one line per strip. Turn any strip and you get a new sonnet that still rhymes, because every sonnet uses the same rhymes in the same places. Ten choices for each of fourteen lines makes 10¹⁴ poems.
One thing to hold: A book cut into strips, one line per strip, and a rule that any strip may go with any other.
Why it matters: Queneau and the mathematician François Le Lionnais had just founded the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians who write under rules. The Strip Book here works the same way with three lines of ten strips, so 10 × 10 × 10 = 1,000 poems; the strips are new, written for this page. Beside it, the Model writes from counts, the way Shannon built sentences from word pairs (see Counting what comes next).
What we don’t know: Queneau said a person reading one sonnet a minute, all day, would need about 190 million years to read them all. Whether that many poems are a book, or a machine, is a question the Oulipo liked to leave open.
Dates:
- 1948 Shannon builds English sentences from word pairs.
- 1960 Queneau and Le Lionnais found the Oulipo.
- 1961 A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems is published.