The Oulipian Constraint Pt. 1

I want to start by honoring Corey Bobco, a developer I stumbled across this weekend while watching TV and scrolling Github. After reading through his Python program generativepoetry-py, I decided to look him up and discovered that he passed away in 2020 at the age of 31. He seems to have been a brilliant creative and wonderful person, and since I can’t reach out to him to thank him for his work like I hoped to, I thought it best to dedicate a portion of this to his memory. In lieu of linking to the obituary I stumbled across, which felt a bit too personal, I’ve included a few pieces of his work around visual poems and code at the bottom of this note. The more of it I’ve learned, the more that code has become a visual art for me and it felt right to add it here.

generativepoetry-py, as the name implies, generates concrete poetry assembled by algorithms using a series of modules for things like random conjunctions, related words, mathematical symbols, and both uniform and variable spaces. You can think of it as a computer-coded, more abstract take on an Oulipian constraint. A framework, or perhaps more of a philosophy, for assembling literature founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais under the acronym Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), which Italo Calvino was a part of to some extent as well. Since Calvino’s work Invisible Cities has been one of the most formative books for me ever, and since why it’s been so important is only now starting to come more into focus for me, I will save that topic for another day. The program then “prints” the poems to PDF, allowing them to live conceptually and otherwise more as an image than a text in a conventional sense. After a bit of research, it seems like the intention for this neck of the poetic woods is to treat pieces like these more as a Rorschach test than something you read aloud. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a great exercise for stretching your mind a bit and getting yourself out of your normal longitude and latitude.

Another major influence on this program was Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature by F.T. Marinetti, an Italian poet and art theorist who founded the Futurist movement. It’s 6 pages long, and a pretty interesting read if linguistic theory has ever barked up your tree. I will note that, as you might expect from someone founding something called Futurism in the early 1900s, Marinetti gets out in front of his skis quite a bit in parts of this and was very certainly a pompous dick. Nevertheless, there are some significant moments and concepts in here that are worth swamping your way through if you have 20 minutes or so.

There’s a lot more to explore here beyond Bobco’s program and its influences, but checking through Oulipo and Merinetti’s manifesto is a great place to start if you want to wander through the exposed roots of the massive generative literature tree. This is going to be a fun climb, and I have no idea where we’ll end up, but I can certainly promise that it’s going to be worth the eye-movement and mouse-clicking calories you burn as we go.