On the members of Oulipo

From the Oulipo Compendium.
Original members of Oulipo founded in 1960--Raymond Queneau, Francois Le Lionnais, Jacques Bens, Claude Berge, Latis (Emmanuel Peillet), Jacques Du Chateau, Andre Blavier, Jean Queval, Albert Marie Schmidt, Noel Arnaud and Jean Lescure.

Jacques Roubaud joins in 1966, Georges Perec in 1967. Italo Calvino in 1973. Harry Mathews in 1972.
Other members and years they joined. Marcel Benabou-1969. Oskar Pastior-1994. Jacques Jouet-1983. Ian Monk-1998. Marcel Duchamp-1962. Ross Chambers, Stanley Chapman and Paul Braffort all in 1961. Paul Fournel in 1971. Michele Metail in 1975. Luc Etiene in 1970. Francois Caradec in 1983. Herve Le Tellier in 1992. Michelle Grangaud in 1995. Pierre Rosenstiehl in 1992. Bernard Cerquiglini in 1996. Anne F Garreta has joined since then. Some question whether Warren Motte or Lynn Crawford are also official members.

Sorry for how disjointed this is. I had much more informative essay but it got eaten when I tried to submit it. This is a rush job as I have somewhere to be. I'll try to add to this later.

A few more additions. Garretta joined in 2000 along with Olivier Salon. Valerie Beaudoin is a 2003. No Motte.

http://allrss.com/wikipedia.php?title=Oulipo

scroll down and you'll find the aforementioned Lynn Crawford. I have no year for her entry nor for Frederic Forte or the Canadian poet Victor Coleman though being an ice hockey fan here is one of Coleman's poems.

SP(IT)ORTS HURTS

There's no precision in hockey
All the tension is losing the puck
I have talked to people
People who find baseball boring
They deserve hockey

The college of Pataphysics was formed in 1949. Alfred Jarry of Ubu fame was a particular focus of the group. Among the members were several who would go on to be Oulipians. They included Queneau, Latis, Arnaud, Duchamp and Caradec. Among the other members of the college we have such names as Francisco Arrabal, the filmmaker Bunuel, Julio Cortazar, Max Ernst, Eugene Ionesco, Michel Leiris, The Marx brothers, Joan Miro, Francis Ponge, Joan Miro, Jacques Prevert and Boris Vian.

Queneau and Le Lionnais actually formed Oulipo but apparently the idea was Blavier's. Schmidt was the one who gets credit for naming it. Not all the members are or were novelists or poets--some are mathematicians, philosophers--some cross back and forth between one form or the other.

Influences include the medieval heretic Giordano Bruno. Mathematicians David Hilbert and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. From literature what is described as 'anticipatory plagiarists' among whom are Lassos of Hermione, Ausonius, Ramon Llull, Arnout Daniel, George Herbert, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, a particularly important one Raymond Roussel and Unica Zurn.

Among contemporary writers seen as compatible to the aims of Oulipo we find Walter Abish, Alphonse Allais, Richard Beard, John Ashberry, Keith Waldrop, Stefan Themerson, Gilbert Sorrentino, Christopher Middleton, Richard Curtis, Dallas Wiebe, Edward Vincent Wright, Zurn and a German poet Schuldt.

Just a little bit more.

An Italian version of Oulipo--Oplepo.

Founding members were or included--Raffaele Aragona, Domenico Doria and Ruggiero Campagnoli.

A final piece of trivia. In Perec's Life: A user's manual--the character Leon Salini is an anagram for Le Lionnais.

Wow! Ask & ye shall receive! Will be fun exploring the works of all these arcane (at least to me) authors. I have read Gilbert Sorrentino's most famous work, Mulligan Stew, which begins with 27 rejection letters from various publishers rejecting Sorrentino's latest novel, Mulligan Stew. Metafictional masterpiece, I can see why he'd be linked to Oulippo with his rampant pomo experimentation. You've been very busy, Iriley...thanks for passing along all your research and knowledge!

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OT, but the Pataphysics issue of Evergreen Review also included some translations from Nouvelles en trois lignes; I had to dig it out of its box when the subject of Luc Sante's new translation came up in the NYRB group.

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Oplepo has a straightforward web site, offering a longer list of members.
As I recall, mainstream English readers were given a taste of Giuseppe Varaldo by Le Ton Beau de Marot.

I might add Mark Dunn who wrote Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable to the list of Oulipo types.

All the writers listed above were taken from the book Oulipo compendium except for those writers who joined the group after 1998 when that book was published. The additional names of newer Oulipo members came from wikipedia.

At the site, Complete Review http://www.complete-review.com/maindex/oulipo.htm , there is a list of writers separated into who is and is not part of Oulipo. The writers listed who use Oulipo rules and constraints but are not members are:
Walter Abish
David Bellos isn't he Perec's biographer?
Inger Christensen
Julio Cortazar
Mark Dunn
Kevin Jackson
Matt Madden
Jeff Noon
Dan Rhodes
Raymond Roussel
Philip Terry
Dumitru Tsepeneag

Bellos is Perec's biographer.

I also left out:

Gerard Durozoi -- History of the Surrealist Movement

Well that seems a good list as well vpfluke. I was just mainly trying to say what my source was and why I would include someone. Roussel actually was listed as an anticipatory plagiarist by the group. He came before there was any such thing as Oulipo.

I only read a bit of Roussel in one of his book in a bookshop. He had strange ideas, such a writing short stories beginning and ending with "almost" the same phrase, except for one letter which changed the meaning. I remember a story beginning with
"La lettre du blanc sur la bande du billard" (the mark of the white ball on the billiard cushion)
and ending with
"La lettre du blanc sur la bande du pillard" (the white man's letter about the pillager's band).
Once he had selected the two phrases, he apparently "only had" to fit the story in between...

Canadian poet Christian Bok.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_B%C3%B6k