#ParisinJuly2025: A unique French poetry book

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Today, I’m presenting what might be the most unique poetry book you have ever heard of!

📚 Cent mille milliards de poèmes,
by Raymond Queneau
Poetry
1961
38 pages
Available in English as
A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
Reading for #20booksofSummer2025

I really enjoy Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), the co-founder of the Oulipo movement.

What is Oulipo?
Oulipo (pronounced “oo-lee-po”) stands for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, which translates to “Workshop of Potential Literature.” It is a literary movement founded in France in 1960 by a group of writers and mathematicians.
These writers’characteristic is that they create literature using self-imposed constraints.
The most famous example is the Lipogram, that is, writing a text without using a certain letter at all. Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition / A Void was written entirely without the letter “e”!
I really love this author, as well as another famous Oulipo member, from Italy: Italo Calvino.

I wanted to read Cent mille milliards de poèmes, and realized there was no way I could find it here in the US, but suddenly I found a website with the list of all the verses and I can play with it.
I’m using a lot of data from that website, translating it in English for you.

Raymond Queneau was the creator of a form of poetry called combinatorial poetry. It consists of creating on the fly a large number of poems based on a set of pre-written verses. Cent mille milliards de poèmes is based on this idea, hence the unicity of it!

According to Queneau’s own words in his preface

This little work allows anyone to compose at will one hundred thousand billion sonnets, all regular of course. It is, all in all, a sort of machine for making poems, but in limited number; it is true that this number, although limited, provides reading for nearly two hundred million years (reading twenty-four hours a day).

Queneau’s book-object offers the reader “a machine” (as he calls it) that allows you to combine verses in order to compose poems that conform to the classical form of the regular sonnet: two quatrains followed by two tercets, making fourteen verses.

The book contains 10 pages, each cut into 14 horizontal strips representing the 14 lines of a sonnet (see this short video). The front of each strip contains a single line. By turning the strips separately, you can therefore compose any of the 10¹⁴ poems! Obviously, the rhyme scheme is perfectly respected for all the poems that can be formed.

The website Emusicale.free.fr gives you all the verses (10 verses in 14 sets), and allows you to click on a verse in each set to make you own poem, and then print it.
You can also click on a button at the end of each set, to create a random poem without you choosing the verses!

Here is the poem I created today. I have tried several these past few days, and they all end up rather pessimistic, and hilarious!:

C’était à cinq o’clock que sortait la marquise
Pour consommer un thé puis des petits gâteaux
Sur la place un forain de feu se gargarise
Il chantait tout de même oui mais il chantait faux

Je me souviens encor de cette heure exquise
Quand se carbonisait la fureur des châteaux
Nous regrettions un peu ce tas de marchandise
Lorsqu’on voyait au loin flamber les arbrisseaux

Le brave a beau crier ah cré non saperlotte
Comme à Chandernagor le manant sent la crotte
Les croque-morts sont là pour se mettre au turbin

Cela considérant ô lecteur tu suffoques
Comptant tes abattis lecteur tu te disloques
Toute chose pourtant doit avoir une fin

I asked Claude.ai for an English translation. They managed to make it rime, but more like a Shakespearian sonnet. Still, brilliant!

It was at five o’clock the marquise went out
To consume some tea and petit fours so sweet
On the square a fire showman gave a shout
He sang all the same but his tune was not meet

I still remember that hour without doubt
When castle fury burned in summer heat
We regretted a bit that merchant’s route
When we saw distant shrubs in flames compete

The brave man cries in vain “ah blast and flout!”
Like Chandernagor where peasants smell of peat
The undertakers come to work throughout

Considering this, reader, you retreat
Counting your limbs, reader, you’re knocked about
Yet everything must find its end complete

What do you think?
What is the most unique book you have ever read?
Please leave the link to your own post,
so I can visit.