Roussel's poem, more than lending its name to the project and to this site, is also complementary to the structure of the book, and accurately conveys some of the complexity of elaborating the flow of a novel that demands both a telling of a story and the recitation, or at any rate inclusion, of historical facts.
This is the "classic" view of the poem. It does very little to alter the original, print representation.
François Caradec, one of the most distinguished Roussel scholars, provided the analysis which this view is based on in the 1964 issue of Bizarre magazine dedicated to Roussel.
Juan-Esteban Fassio, an Argentine 'pataphysician, proposed the idea of a Machine à lire Raymond Roussel in Bizarre. Here is the same, adapted to the web.