'Pataphysique and Oulipo

I was just reading the wikipedia article on OuLiPo when I stumbled on something called " 'Pataphysics ". From my understanding of the article, 'pataphysics is a sort of meta-meta-physics, and a parody of modern science and philosophy. It turns out that Oulipo started out as a sort of sub-committee at the College de 'Pataphysique, and so I was wondering what the relation was between the movement and its ideological origin.

Even the central tenets of the "college" are paradoxical and slightly amusing: "The real 'pataphysicist takes nothing seriously, except 'Pataphysics... which consists of taking nothing seriously." The whole movement is almost a big joke, and yet it produced some very pertinent and powerful work, for example, the Oulipo that we have been studying. This just goes to show that parody and criticism truly are powerful and constructive tools in the literary world.

Something I noticed, however, is how similar this whole abstractions of abstractions concept (the "meta-metaphysics") sounds to Marianne Moore's "works so derivative as to become unintelligible". In the end, I find that the Oulipo poets sometimes differ only very little from those poets who like to fill their work with quasi-indecipherable metaphors and all sorts of esoteric literary allusions.

While Moore criticizes poets who go so far from reality as to make it disappear amongst the complexity of the allegory, I think that the Oulipo poets sometimes stray so far from the standard forms of poetry that the initial concept is swallowed up in the lists of words or structural games. With moderation, the constraints that these poets use can yield very interesting results, for example, Mullen's "Mantra for a Classless Society" seemed to have a point, and it was analyzable, to some extent. On the other hand, "O 'Tis William" just seems like silly wordplay, and I find it almost impossible to delve into the poem's meaning or point at all, I'm just not interested!

Oulipo, and writing with constraints, represent some interesting concepts, and I like how these poets and authors tried to explore the language mathematically and systematically, but sometimes it just seems like they go over the top. The idea is interesting, (for example, the N+7 thing can produce some interesting results), but the actual product is not necessarily a literary triumph (Anyone can look through a dictionary and systematically change the words of a poem.