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Copies are on their way to Small Press Distribution — but not available for order yet. We’ll keep you updated. For now, order copies directly from us!

“The title of Philip Terry’s brilliant book pays explicit homage to the Oulipo; but while he uses many of the group’s methods, he invariably goes his own way with them, making poems that are full of an original sense of wit and wonder. He has taken the notion that poetry can emerge from arbitrary procedures and transformed it into a sumptuous variety of explosively novel delights.”
—Harry Mathews

Philip Terry was born in Belfast in 1962 and has been working with Oulipian and related writing practices for over twenty years. His lipogrammatic novel The Book of Bachelors (1999), was highly praised by the Oulipo: “Enormous rigour, great virtuosity—but that’s the least of it.” Currently he is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Essex, where he teaches a graduate course on the poetics of constraint. His work has been published in Panurge, PN Review, Oasis, North American Review, and Onedit, and his books include the celebrated anthology of short stories Ovid Metamorphosed (2000) and Fables of Aesop (2006). His translation of Raymond Queneau’s last book of poems, Elementary Morality, is forthcoming from Carcanet. Oulipoems is his first book of poetry.

Maro Ajemian was one of the best of Cage’s “prepared piano” players. This poem is taken from Babette Deutsch’s Collected Poems 1919–1962 (Indiana University Press, 1963.)

Piano Recital
(for Maro Ajemian and John Cage)

Her drooping wrist, her arm
Move as a swan should move,
First singing when death dawns
Upon the plumaged flesh.
But here no swan wings thresh,
No river runs. A woman
Strikes hidden strings in love.

Now slow–as fronds of palms–
Her fingers on the keys.
Lifted, her listening arms
Ponder the theme afresh,
until it seems young flesh
Is momentarily transmuted
To echo’s effigy.

No no–the risen hands
Pounce on the keys, destroy
The hush, rush on, command
The blacks, the ivories,
in flight now with the keys
To grief’s unwindowed prison,
To the low gate of joy.

She leans with sparkling looks
Toward the dark wood, her strong
Hands work as gleaners should.
Then, as who would caress
A birdlike wordlessness,
She stoops–to drink the meaning
At the still brink of song.

Chivers in the Milwaukee Sentinel, Tuesday, December 26, 1837.

I found this while scanning through the microfilms at the Milwaukee Public Library in 1980, and just recently rediscovered it in papers destined for the University of Maryland library.

For The Milwaukee Sentinel

Mr. Editor— The enclosed beautiful lines, I cut from a Philadelphia paper. There is beauty, pathos, and melancholy in the scene, which belongs only to the aspirations of poetry to delineate. I present them to you, considering them not unworthy of a place in your columns. M…E.

Song, Arranged to a Popular Southern Melody, By C.F.

On the lake where drooped the willow,
Long time ago!
Where the rock threw back the billow
Brighter than snow–
Dwelt a maid beloved and cherished
By high and low:
But with autumn’s leaf she perish’d,
Long time ago!

Rock, and tree, and flowing water,
Long time ago–
Bird, and bee, and blossom taught her
Love’s spell to know–
While to my fond words she listen’d,
Murmuring low–
Tenderly her dove-eyes glisten’d,
Long time ago!

Mingled were our hearts forever!
Long time ago,
Can I now forget her?–never!–
No, lost one, no!
To her grave these tears are given–
Ever to flow!
She’s the star I miss’d from heaven,
Long time ago!