Oulipoems is now available for order from Ahadada Books. Click here for more information. Or — go directly to our shop and order.

Copies are on their way to Small Press Distribution — but not available for order yet. We’ll keep you updated. For now, order copies directly from us!



“The _title_ of Philip Terry’s brilliant book pays explicit homage to the Oulipo; but while he uses many of the group’s methods, he invariably goes his own way with them, making poems that are full of an original sense of wit and wonder. He has taken the notion that poetry can emerge from arbitrary procedures and transformed it into a sumptuous variety of explosively novel delights.”
—Harry Mathews

Philip Terry was born in Belfast in 1962 and has been working with Oulipian and related writing practices for over twenty years. His lipogrammatic novel The Book of Bachelors (1999), was highly praised by the Oulipo: “Enormous rigour, great virtuosity—but that’s the least of it.” Currently he is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Essex, where he teaches a graduate course on the poetics of constraint. His work has been published in Panurge, PN Review, Oasis, North American Review, and Onedit, and his books include the celebrated anthology of short stories Ovid _meta_morphosed (2000) and Fables of Aesop (2006). His translation of Raymond Queneau’s last book of poems, Elementary Morality, is forthcoming from Carcanet. Oulipoems is his first book of poetry.

Order here.

Source: Ahadada Books

Interestingly, there is another (small) collection en_title_d "Oulipoems" available on the Web, by the American New Media artist Millie Niss, with some help from her mother Martha Deed. It was recently included in The Electronic Literature Collection, a big collection of electronic literature which was published in the USA at the end of last year - see http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/niss__oulipoems.html .

Another piece of work much-influenced by the Oulipo and available online is Peter McCarey's poem-sequence "The Syllabary", in which he is attempting to produce a short poem for every one-syllable word in the English/Scottish language - http://www.thesyllabary.com/ .

- Edward Picot

Thanks for mentioning that, Edward. In fact, I met Martha Deed in Buffalo last weekend at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair and she mentioned The Electronic Literature Collection after seeing copies of Terry's book.

Peter McCarey's Syllabary though is new to me — I'm off to check it out further now.