The Oulipo factor: the procedural poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall
2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236042000183250
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
ResumoAbstract The French Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) has long experimented with procedural or rule-governed poetics, its members creating elaborate numerical constraints that a given text must follow. Jacques Roubaud and Michel Benabou, for example, collected hundreds of alexandrines, broke them into hemistichs and recombined the latter so as to create a whole set of new poems, the purpose being to show the possibilities of the alexandrine as verse form. Indeed, in his brilliant critical study La Vieillesse d'Alexandre, Jacques Roubaud makes the case for a new 'formal' poetry that by no means uses standard metrics. The poetry of constraint is finally catching on in the English-speaking world, providing an alternative to the self-centred, slack, 'unpoetic' free verse that has become ubiquitous. The cardinal rule of procedural poetics is that the constraint in question is not just a formal device but becomes a thematic property of the poem or fiction. This article discusses recent procedural poetry in English, beginning with the example of Harry Matthews' '35 variations on a theme from Shakespeare', and then focusing on the work of two younger poets, the Canadian Christian Bök and the English poet Caroline Bergvall. Bök's Eunoia is an inverted lipogram, its five sections each built on a single vowel, A, E, I, O, U, and submitting its words to a series of other rules. The long poem demonstrates what sound repetition does and can do in poetry. Bergvall's VIA, a rule-governed sequence based on translations of the first tercet of Dante's Inferno, is another brilliant tour de force. Her more recent 'About face', while not, strictly speaking, a rule-governed composition, uses pun, sound play and elaborate verbal device to create a composition whose sonic artifice stands in sharp opposition to the typical lineated but otherwise quite prosaic verse that is now the norm. Keywords: Oulipofree verseconstraintalexandrineprosodylipogrampoetic formprocedural versebergvallBökRoubaud Notes Stephane Mallarmé, 'Crise de vers', in Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (eds), Variations sur un sujet, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pleiade, 1946), p. 362. Translation mine. W.B. Yeats, Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (1935–38) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 61. Jacques Roubaud, La vieillesse d'Alexandre. Essai sur quelques états récents du vers français (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1988), p. 7. Subsequently cited in the text as VA. Jacques Roubaud, 'Introduction, The Oulipo and Combinatorial Art', in Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (eds), Oulipo Compendium (London: Atlas Press, 1998), pp. 41–2. Subsequently cited in the text as OuC. Michel Bénabou, 'Alexandre au greffoir', in La Bibliothèque Oulipienne, Vol. 2 (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1987), pp. 202–33. Subsequently cited in the test as BEN. OuC, p. 227. A literal translation would be 'Lovers devoted to impassive rivers/ Are equally devoted, in the shadow of the forests,/To cats and sweet like the flesh of children/Who like them are sensitive to the chill in the cold darkness.' Again a literal translation: 'Fervent Lovers and austere scholars/In their ripe season, are equally fond/of cats, strong and soft, the pride of the household,/ Who, like them, are sensitive to the cold and, like them, sedentary.' Harry Mathews, '35 variations on a theme from Shakespeare', Shiny, 9/10 (1999), pp. 97–101. The N+7 method involves replacing each noun (N) with the seventh following it in the dictionary. Much depends upon the dictionary chosen: the shorter the dictionary, the more discordant the next word is likely to be. See OuC, pp. 198–9. For a discussion of Cage's use of constraints in Roaratorio, see my 'The music of verbal space: John Cage's "What you Say"', in Adalaide Morris (ed.), Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Accoustical Technologies, with accompanying CD (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 129–48. The poems, in the order cited, may be found in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2, ed. Jahan Ramazani (New York: Norton, 2003): Yusef Komunyakaa, 'My Father's Love Letters', p. 863; James Fenton, 'Dead Soldiers', p. 901; Jorie Graham, 'The Dream of the Unified Field', p. 927; Rita Dove, 'Claudette Colvin Goes to Work', p. 986; Thylias Moss, 'Interpretation of a Poem by Frost', p. 1001; Cathy Song, 'Sunworshippers', p. 1022; Henri Cole, 'Folly', p. 1038. In all fairness, the anthology does contain a sampling of 'alternate' poetries: for example, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Michael Palmer, and there are of course poets such as Paul Muldoon who use sound in interesting ways. But the dominant mode is the one I describe here. I discuss what I call 'the linear fallacy' in an essay by that name for The Georgia Review, 35 (winter 1981), pp. 855–69. Language poetry and related experimental modes of the 1990s differ from this model in that syntax is often fractured, continuity fragmented and puns multiple. But, interestingly, the aural dimension of poetry generally plays no more as well as catachreses multiple. But sound plays no greater part here than in the more mainstream poems above. Here are two typical poems published in Douglas Messerli's From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960–1990 (Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon Press, 1994), Ray di Palma's 'The Wrong Side of the Door': Supplementary to the account Are a series of tangled memories And observations at random Written in a logbook bound in burlap. (p. 661) And James Sherry's 'Pay Cash Only': She shakes feathers toward him to ward off buttering his own small bills, filled with soldiers of diverse excess, caught up in an investment in lunch. As they say, 'Hog tied to penny rolls, his car won't go down the road straight.' (p. 707) Again, however complex their irony and word play, the form of the poems is lineated prose. See The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 14. The article on African poetry is by George Lang. The Encyclopedia is subsequently cited in the text as PEEP. Christian Bök, Eunoia (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2001), p. 103. All further page references are from this edition. The head-note and complete text of Via have not yet been published. How 2, 1, 6 (2001). The website is http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/ stadler center/how2/. An excerpt from 'About Face' is published as an appendix to my interview with Caroline Bergvall, 'ex/Créme/entral/eaT/ing', Sources: Revue d'etudes Anglophones : Special issue, '20th-century American women's poetics of engagement', 12 (spring 2002), pp. 123–35. Like Via, 'About Face' will appear in Bervall's new book Mesh, where the headnodes have been revised. E-mail to me, 14 March 2003. Subsequently cited as CB note. See Retallack's 'Narrative as Memento Mori' in Essay IX. Hugh Kenner, 'Something to say', in A Homemade World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 60.
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