Suppose you wake up with a terrific idea for a story but a terrifying idea for how the story must be told. A character suffers a series of strokes, and in each crisis the language somehow parallels what the character goes through.
More serious inconveniences occur as our man's arm moves cease.
As greater stresses sever ravaged edges, adverse fates create rare verse-reverted dreads. For poor fools who go on, sorrows grow. The Compendium contains biographical sketches of its members, entries of Oulipian forms by writers like Gilbert Sorrentino and Walter Abish, and whole sections on offshoot groups. Best of all, the Compendium functions as an encyclopedia of constraints. Most of them might seem absurd to writers who believe that grammar and genre provide all the restrictions anyone should have to endure.