Two Sylvias' Weekly Muse: April 6, 2025

Issue 153

Hello, Poets!

Welcome to April and to National Poetry Month! In doing some research on different poetic schools, we came across a group of poets and writers with an interesting bent—the Oulipians. Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or "Workshop for Potential Literature") is a group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 in Paris by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Their goal is to explore how constraints—such as mathematical formulas, formal rules, or arbitrary restrictions—can generate creative writing.

Oulipo is considered a countermovement to Surrealist techniques in writing. Whereas writers experimenting with Surrealism might employ automatic writing, dreams, chance, randomness, and tapping the subconscious, Oulipo favors constraints using designed structures, rules, and algorithms based on logic and mathematics.

Oulipians believe that imposing strict and formal constraints forces writers to find unexpected solutions, leading to new forms of creati…