I’m interested more in the differences than the continuities, and how the use of the constraints provide a kind of critical view on convention.

It’s true that deliberately setting out to write oulipian (or oubapian) work is (and feels) different from writing genre fiction, or any other conventionally constrained form. But the difference as I understand it is mainly that in oulipo the constraints are arbitrary, not inherited, and chosen for the project at hand (often in advance of a subject for the project). There’s still an awful lot of similarity between oulipian constraints and the formal constraints poets or novelists adopt by convention — because adopting those formal or generic constraints is still a choice.

A good first place to start learning about poetic form is John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason. It’s short, and it can come across as a little show-offy or smug sometimes, but it explains everything pretty clearly. There are also more detailed books. I like David Caplan’s Poetic Form: an Introduction, too.

I taught a course on poetic form last year. If you’d like me to send you the syllabus, I can.

I think there is a terminological problem at play here. All media are constraining in one sense or another, I agree, but I see a difference in degree and, often, in kind of the type of constraint practiced by the Oulipo or related creators and the type of constraint found in generic conventions or institutional restrictions. I see a difference between an author writing a mystery novel, following certain expectations of genre, and a work like John Barth’s LETTERS (an epistolary novel where correspondents, dates, and organization are dictated by a specific structure (Sorry, can’t find a good explanation of it anywhere)) or many of the works of Gilbert Sorrentino (like Gold Fools or Aberration of Starlight). I would imagine you see a difference between the constrained works you and Mike use and those of the Schulz example.

Perhaps we need a different term to speak of these self-conscious, deliberate, and systematic constraints, thought the use of “constraint” is rather widely used as this point.

As for the sonnet: especially in Shakespeare’s time, it’s both a form (fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhymed a certain way) and a genre (featuring, for example, unrealizable or idealized love). Since Shakespeare, poets have worked to destabilize the generic qualities of the sonnet (though the history of the form still casts shadows over pretty much any sonnet-shaped poem), and to a lesser extent they’ve tried revisions and variations on the formal structure as well.

But when Shakespeare set out to write a sonnet sequence, his readers would have had expectations about his performance both formally and generically. And, to an extent, I think that both sorts of expectations could be felt as constraints.

As I see it, the generic constraints of the sonnet (or of detective fiction) are really no different in kind from the insistence that Tom Hart allude to Brian Eno lyrics. In either case, we see constraints on content and structure: the detective story expects clues, a motive for the culprit, the gradual discovery of plots, etc. A sonnet expects certain kinds of idealization of the beloved. A comic strip expects a punch line in the last or next-to-last panel.

As for Schulz and Peanuts, I really think the only difference we could point to between a “constrained” four-panel layout and an “imposed” four-panel layout is the degree of the artist’s awareness of the constraint. If someone naively repeats a format or a structure without thinking about it as a constraint, then it could hardly “count” for the purposes of critical analysis. But I have a hard time imagining that Schulz was unaware of this layout as a constraint. (Imagine having to fill it six times a week, and it will certainly start to feel constraining.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that really all media are constraining in some way. By working in deliberately or self-consciously constrained forms, a poet or a cartoonist can get better at negotiating this inherent constrainedness in seemingly “free” expression.