Writing can be restricted at the level of the letter: the lipogram prohibits letters from occurring in a text, the beau present requires certain letters, and other forms may place restrictions on the number of letters in a line (as seen in this snowball poem at left). Mathews excelled at the use of lexical constraint in teaching and in his own compositions, and he pioneered new sorts of constraint, including the chronogram, in which all the letters in a text corresponding to Roman numerals sum to a particular calendar year that is the topic of the text.
The Oulipo (Ouvriour de littérature potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature) is an influential, Paris-based group of mathematician, writers, and others interested in understanding, among other things, literary constraints and the possibilities that they afford. The group was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. George Perec introduced Mathews to the group in 1972; Mathews was invited to join the group that year. He remains the only American member.
The cover of this program reprints a famous diamond snowball poem by Mathews, incorporating the names of the members of the Oulipo. The snowball, Mathews writes in Oulipo Compendium, was “already practiced in classical times” and “requires the first word of a text to have only one letter, the second two, the third three, and so on as far as resourcefulness and inspiration allow.” The diamond snowball joins a “melting snowball,” which reverses the length constraint, to the end of a poem written in this form.
