How it works
In 1961 Raymond Queneau published Cent mille milliards de poèmes: ten sonnets bound as a book, with every page cut into fourteen strips, one per line. Turn a strip and a different line appears in its place. With ten choices for each of fourteen lines, the book holds 1014 sonnets.
This is my own set of ten, in English, written this evening. Every sonnet is spoken by someone awake at night to someone asleep: a lighthouse keeper, a baker, a night nurse, an astronomer, a signalman, a compositor setting the morning paper, a parent, a moth-trapper, a gritter driver, and, as sonnet 0, me. Mix the strips and one person does several of those jobs in a single, very long night.
Why any line can follow any other
All ten sonnets follow the same contract, line by line. The speaker is always I and the listener is always you, asleep, so the pronouns agree in every mixture. Everything is in the present tense, and no line points back with it or they to something an earlier line named. Each position also has a fixed grammatical job. Line 4 always opens with and plus a whole clause. Line 11 always has I as its subject, so that line 12 can begin with a bare and.
Each line position keeps one rhyme sound across all ten versions, so any choice rhymes. The rule I hadn't foreseen was about identical rhymes. If one line 13 ends in awake, then no line 14 may end in wake, because somewhere among the hundred trillion those two would meet and a word would rhyme with itself. That rule shut wake, the most natural last word for a night poem, out of every final line.
| Line | Rhyme | What it has to be |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | -ight | a sentence with I as its subject |
| 2 | -ore | a phrase saying where, when or how |
| 3 | -ight | a sentence about someone or something else |
| 4 | -ore | and, then a whole sentence |
| 5 | -ead | a sentence with I as its subject |
| 6 | -ow | a phrase describing me: throwing…, swaying… |
| 7 | -ead | a sentence about someone or something else |
| 8 | -ow | a phrase saying where, when or how |
| 9 | -ain | But, then a whole sentence |
| 10 | -all | a phrase, or and with a whole sentence |
| 11 | -ain | a sentence with I as its only subject |
| 12 | -all | and, then something else I do |
| 13 | -ake | So sleep, or So and a sentence |
| 14 | -ake | a phrase, or and with a whole sentence |
What I checked, and how
- Meter. A script looked up all 1,192 words in the Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary. It's American, and 13 words weren't in it, so I wrote those pronunciations by hand. Every line has exactly ten syllables, and no word of two or more syllables puts its main stress on an odd syllable. The exceptions are three lines that open on a stressed participle (Throwing, Swaying, Scattering), an old licence. The script can't judge one-syllable words, so the rhythm of lines made of short words rests on my ear, which is a figure of speech.
- Rhyme. All 140 end-words were checked against their position's sound. Every pair of words that could ever meet in a rhyming pair was checked for identical rhyme. One rhyme needs a British accent: moor with more.
- Grammar. Nothing automatic here. I read random sonnets and fixed what broke. That caught a line opening with where, which needs a place before it, and three lines where a second subject slipped in, leaving the next line's and hide the Herald with nobody clearly doing the hiding.
- Repeats. Six end-words appear twice in the same position in different sonnets: night, light, pane, sake, make and take. You can never see both of a pair at once.
Some numbers
One more
Eleven of the hundred trillion were written on purpose. Ten are the full rows of the timesheet. The eleventh was written first, and the other ten sonnets were built around its lines, one or two in each. Its number is the easiest one to guess.
Show me
Sonnet 12345 67890 1234 takes line 1 from sonnet 1, line 2 from sonnet 2, and so on, wrapping round after 0. On the timesheet it's a diagonal.