Cent mille milliards de poèmes Reading Order

Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, 1961) by Raymond Queneau is one of the most original works in the history of literature: a book of ten sonnets printed on pages cut into fourteen horizontal strips, one per line, each strip independently turnable, so that the reader can combine any line from any of the ten sonnets with any line from any other to produce new sonnets — a total combinatory potential of 10^14 (one hundred thousand billion) different sonnets, each metrically and formally correct. Queneau calculated that if a reader spent fifteen minutes reading each sonnet and devoted eight hours a day to the task, it would take approximately a million centuries to read all the possible poems. The book is both a mathematical toy and a serious engagement with the question of what a poem is: if a poem is the product of reading as much as writing, and if the reading here is combinatory rather than sequential, then the poems are in some sense generated by the reader's choices rather than the author's. The strips are also beautiful as physical objects — the book is one of the great examples of the livre d'artiste — and the ten base sonnets are among Queneau's finest poems individually. Cent mille milliards de poèmes is the founding text of combinatory poetry and one of the most direct implementations of the Oulipo principle that constraints generate rather than limit literary production.