LAUSR

The remembrance presented in the “Occupation of the Hôtel de Massa” captures an exciting moment in Jacques Roubaud’s early career as a writer. Widely recognized as one of the most important French poets of his generation, Roubaud calls himself a “composer of poetry and mathematics.” An avid theoretician of verse and an uncompromising Oulipian, Roubaud has undertaken much of his writing under the auspices of a programmatic “project” pursued, with notable deviations, for over forty years. Yet historical and cultural events have also shaped his poetic practice. In 1967, the year after he joined the Oulipo, Roubaud published, with the support of Raymond Queneau, 2 (Signe d’appartenance), his first of many major books of poetry to appear with Gallimard. That same year, he was researching linking techniques in medieval Japanese imperial anthologies; the poetics of waka would remain, along with troubadour poetries, important in his compositional techniques for the next fifty years. And then, in June 1968, amid the cultural hangover from the May riots, Roubaud quietly published his highly specialized dissertation in categorical algebra—his career as a poet would be supported, in its initial years, by his activities as a professor of mathematics. Fig. 1: Mai 68: Sollers, Pleynet, Thibaudeau, Guillevic, Deleuze, Roubaud. #Jean-Claude Seine