Monday, December 24, 2007

Does poetry rhyme with math?



I was looking for a different book by Raymond Queneau, but found this intriguing entry at Wikipedia:
Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems or One hundred million million poems (original French title: Cent mille milliards de poèmes), published in 1961, is a set of ten sonnets. They are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, so that there are 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. It would take some 200,000,000 years to read them all, even reading twenty-four hours a day.

Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. (2007, December 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:13, December 24, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hundred_Thousand_Billion_ Poems&oldid=177989282

Although an Internet version was outlawed on the Internet in 1997, lit-geeks thrive.

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