Poe, E.: Near a Raven The poem below was composed in 1995 and bears an uncanny similarity to a certain famous poem by Edgar Allen Poe. This is one of my longer pieces of constrained writing. Constrained writing (an old idea, but one which greatly increased in popularity in the latter half of the 20th century as a result of the work of the mostly French group Oulipo) is the art of constructing a ...

Welcome to Cadaeic Cadenza, my most ambitious foray yet into the mysterious domain of constrained writing. Constrained writing is the art of constructing a work of prose or poetry that obeys some artificial condition, usually related to the alphabet or some other aspect of word or sentence structure. For example, there are two published novels from which the letter e is absent - Gadsby, by ...

Pi + The Raven + AANVVV = Constrained writing strikes again. In December 1995, I had already written Near A Raven , a revised version of Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven that, while attempting to remain as close as possible to the story, meter, rhyme scheme, and tone of the original, also satisfies the rather onerous condition that the lengths of the successive words in the poem are ...