Oulipo: Saints of Constraint

Broockman, who is interested in both poetry and constraints, would love the Oulipo school, who are such connoisseurs of poetic constraint that the modest limits of the sonnet scarcely clear their bar; a sonnet written only of pangrams would, maybe. I love them primarily because the tantalizing possibility of having a constraint named after oneself is too much to resist, but also because of this blurb from the back of Writings for the Oulipo:

When presented with a constraint, two things can happen: either the constraint is easy, in which case Ian yawns and goes to sleep. Or else it is difficult. He then wakes up and gets to work. The more the constraint is difficult, the more the work is excellent. —Jacques Roubaud

The lion's share of Oulipian poetry is simply awful, but the best of it confirms one of the Five Things I Know But Cannot Prove: constraints make highs higher and lows lower. An excellent sonnet is better than the best free verse poem; some of the Clash's punk stuff is worse than the genre-less "Train in Vain," but the best of it is much better; I'd rather be "a real woman" than "a real human being."

One of the highest Oulipian highs is this six-piece cycle, in which Ian Monk takes the vowels one at a time. The entry for O:

To do or not to do: Gods, how to opt?
For who knows good from wrong, or wrong from good;
who'd follow forlorn lords, bow down to clods,
stoop to Sodom, boom songs of so long loss,
or dog coxcombs, hobnob to hollow loons;
who'd down hootch, long for boons Gods know not of;
who'd drool onto dons, for whom tomfools blot
drops onto books, or low words (how now brown cow?);
who'd smooth wrongs, mock worlds from top to bottom,
or crow to crowds for blood; who'd doctor horrors,
or woo doom's pogroms, Lot's loss, Bloom's sorrows,
or woof of wolf or woof of Clotho's loom?
So do not! Good's soon wrong, wrong's soon good for
tomorrow, tomorrow, for tomorrow.

You can give the U one a miss (it's called "Ur-Tush"), but don't skip A ("As, last March at an Arkansas bar... FLASHBACK!"). Taken as a whole, "Homage to Georges Perec: An Entertainment in Six Univocalisms" gives the impression that Monk isn't working within this particular constraint merely because he wants to show off, but because he's interested in vowels and what's up with them.

Another example: Monk writes a review of the English translation of Perec's La Disparition (a novel written without the letter e; the English version is called A Void) keeping the lipogrammatic constraint.

I must say that I found it an amusing work in its own right but, as a translation, frankly disappointing. I should point out straight away that, in my opinion, writing without any particular symbol in this British idiom of ours is not, in fact, that hard. Anybody with an inch of wit can do it...

On one hand, he's just having fun. On the other, he's simultaneously amplifying his contempt and making it playful and unserious. I wouldn't want to recommend the rigors of Oulipo to most poets, nor do I want to recommend comparably rigorous traditions, gender roles, and identities to anyone, but it pays to see what an enthusiasm for constraints looks like when taken to extremes: not half bad.