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Advanced Immorality

The author has a long-standing cross-cultural engagement with the research and writing of Oulipo ('Ouvroir de littérature potentielle') in Paris. The group’s innovative poetics exploring constraint, mathematics and permutation, intertextuality and new forms of experimental and homolinguistic translation, has been largely neglected by mainstream Anglo-Saxon poets and fiction writers alike, though traces of it can be found in the work of Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Terry’s work in general aims to explore and develop the potential of Oulipian writing in English with a view to “making it new”, in Ezra Pound’s phrase. Here, specifically, the book explores and extends the use of Oulipo’s fifteen-line fixed form, the quennet, using it in the title sequence to antonymically translate his own translations of Queneau’s inaugural poems in this form from his 'Elementary Morality', then adapting the form into prose for the sequence “A Berlin Notebook”, which explores the rich potential of the form for documentary purposes. The book also explores the sestina structure, of longstanding interest to the Oulipo, in original ways, combining it with π to determine the permutations of “Days”.