Philip Terry

For the first time, this is an anthology of 100 pieces of 'Oulipo' writing, celebrating the literary group who revelled in maths problems, puzzles, trickery, wordplay and conundrums. Featuring writers including Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, it includes poems, short stories, word games even recipes. Alongside these famous Oulipians, are 'anticipatory' wordsmiths who crafted language with unusual constraints and literary tricks, from Jonathan Swift to Lewis Carroll. Philip Terry's playful selection will appeal to lovers of word games, puzzles and literary delights.

The Penguin Book of Oulipo

Taking as its starting point marginal images in the Bayeux Tapestry, which have been left largely unexplained by historians, Terry retells the story of the Norman Conquest from the point of view of the tapestry's English embroiderers. Combining magic realism and Oulipian techniques, this is a tour de force of narrative and language. Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is currently Director of Creative Writing at the University of Essex.

Tapestry

After Du Bellay

Bad Times

Shakespeare's sonnets

Quennets

Dictator

Ovid Metamorphosed

Poetry. Harry Matthews writes: "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."

Oulipoems 2

Poetry. 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. "The title of Philip Terry's brilliant book pays explicit homage to theOulipo; 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.

Oulipoems

John O'Brien

The Book of Bachelors by Philip Terry

The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1999)

Between 1970 and 1982, George Perec sent his friends small pamphlets with his best wishes for the New Year. These were collections of short texts based on homophonic variations. The three pieces are neither translations of this material, nor entirely original pieces of work, rather a sort of homage to Perec.

Three Wishes

Queneau, Perec, Calvino and the Adventure of Form

Dictator recreates Gilgamesh using the 1,500-word vocabulary of Globish, put together by Jean-Paul Nerrière. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to record business transactions. Nerrière considered it the world dialect of the third millenium; likewise Akkadian, the language of Gilgamesh, was the lingua franca of communications in the Near East. This link between script, language and business is there in the substance of the poem. An underpinning theme involving trade, here trade in hard wood and access to forests for building materials, links the poem to recent wars in and around Iraq, where the contemporary commodity is oil. This in turn links the poem to related issues such as migration and the refugee crisis. Working with refugees in Palermo in 2017, Terry was involved with putting on a puppet version of Gilgamesh where the children related viscerally to the story, particularly the boat scenes.

James Davies

When Two Are In Love or As I Came To Behind Frank's Transporter

The shape-shifting poetry of Ovid's Metamorphoses has fascinated writers and artists from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes, Rembrandt to Picasso. Its eternal freshness is haunted by an ancient idea: that a person's true nature is revealed when their physical shape is changed- the wolf-like man becomes a wolf, the obsessive spinner a spider.For this dazzling collection Philip Terry asked leading writers to take Ovid as a starting point and set their invention free. The results are startling, from Apollo and Phaeton transposed to a Dutch classroom to Diana and Actaeon in the rain of Nova Scotia. We find fables, grotesques and white-coated scientists; sports-cars, swans and shells; and even Ovid himself, high-spirited and unrepentant, speaking to us from beyond the grave.Challenging the very shape of the modern short story, Ovid Metamorphosed is a kaleidoscope of delights, scary, sexy, suggestive and profoundly entertaining.

Following his irreverent Oulipian reworking of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante's Inferno, shifting the action from the twelfth century to the present day and relocating it to the modern walled city' of the University of Essex. Dante's Phlegethon becomes the river Colne; his popes are replaced by vice-chancellors and education ministers; the warring Guelfs and Ghibellines are re-imagined as the sectarians of Belfast, Terry's home city. Meanwhile, the guiding figure of Virgil takes on new form as Ted Berrigan, one-time visiting professor at Essex and a poet who had himself imagined the underworld: I heard the dead, the city dead / The devils that surround us' ( Memorial Day'). In reimagining an Inferno for our times, Terry stays paradoxically true to the spirit of Dante's original text.

Dante's Inferno

Inspired by the flotsam of contemporary culture, Philip Terry transforms Shakespeare's sonnet sequence into a celebration of language unleashed. The results are as disrespectful and anarchic as a cartoon - and as assured in their control of line. Philip Terry, an acclaimed translator of the poetry of Raymond Queneau, plays language games by the rules of Oulipo in his creation of a Shakespearean chimera, the hybrid that takes on a life of its own.

Philip Terry

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