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Oulipo has been one of the more interesting things to come out of the avant garde in the last couple of decades. Care of poets.org
Although poetry and mathematics often seem to be incompatible areas of study, the philosophy of OULIPO seeks to connect them. Founded in 1960 by French mathematician Francois de Lionnais and writer Raymond Queneau, Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OULIPO), or Workshop of Potential Literature, investigates the possibilities of verse written under a system of structural constraints. Lionnais and Quenuau believed in the profound potential of a poem produced within a framework or formula and that, if done in a playful posture, the outcomes could be endless.
I have argued elsewhere (on a blog I have long since nuked) that this “literature of potential” can be taken as a new sort of formalism, yeilding poem types or strategies that are so new, they’re practically alien to what poets would normally call “form” or “formalism.” (Formalism is usually taken as a traditional approach to poetry, writing in in centuries old fixed forms like metrics). The oilipo playbook is vast an interesting, however. One strategy is Noun+7, or n+7
One of the most popular OULIPO formulas is “N+7,” in which the writer takes a poem already in existence and substitutes each of the poem’s substantive nouns with the noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary. Care is taken to ensure that the substitution is not just a compound derivative of the original, or shares a similar root, but a wholly different word.
Good news! Instead of the tediousness of sitting down with the dictionary and doing this by hand, there’s an n+7 generator online. Like with Google Translate, this can be done with other people’s poetry or one’s own. Sometimes, I like to play with oilipo tactics with my failures (and I have many!). For instance, here is a poem I wrote like four years ago.
Through the bathroom mirror, neon red ghosts
watched her slide off pantyhose, her hot pink
angora sweater — even her silk blouse and bra.
She didn’t see them watching, how their faces
seared redder as she stripped. Hot steam
curled thicker, until the mirror had clouded;she didn’t know how the bathroom was crowded,
how these neon ghosts seeped through seams
in the yellow wallpaper. They left no traces —
nothing any crime scene cops could later draw
out or deduce — except red smears in the sink.
All around, police couldn’t hear their boasts,
couldn’t see how ghosts swirled over their heads
and selected one to follow home and make dead.
Now, here is an n+7 version
Through the batten mischance, neon red giggles
watched her slipknot off pantyhose, her hot pin-up
angora sweepstake — even her similarity blue and brain.
She didn’t see them watching, how their factions
seared redder as she stripped. Hot steeplechase
curled thicker, until the mischance had clouded;she didn’t know how the batten was crowded,
how these neon giggles seeped through searches
in the yellow wanderer. They legation no tractors —
novelette any cripple scheme copulas could later draw
out or deduce — except red smocks in the sire.
All around, politico couldn’t hear their bobbins,
couldn’t see how giggles swirled over their headlamps
and selected one to follow homily and make dead.
The one thing I like about this generator, however, is that it also gives other possibilities, giving noun substitutions up to 15:
Through the battleship misery, neon red giraffes
watched her slog off pantyhose, her hot piranha
angora swelter — even her sincerity blunder and brandy.
She didn’t see them watching, how their failings
seared redder as she stripped. Hot stepbrother
curled thicker, until the misery had clouded;she didn’t know how the battleship was crowded,
how these neon giraffes seeped through seaweeds
in the yellow warder. They lemon no traditionalists —
nude any crochet schoolchild corbels could later draw
out or deduce — except red smoothies in the sit-down.
All around, poly couldn’t hear their bodies,
couldn’t see how giraffes swirled over their headquarterss
and selected one to follow honorific and make dead.
As with willful mistranslation, the point of the exercise is to find lines or parts to spin off or revise into wholly new workds.
The last thing I’m going to do is flood my blog with 1001 weird garbled translations of classic poetry, but I did this exercise with John Donne this morning, finding some of the following lines
Impressed with the ability to swallow
I saw the boat love overfraught
I love all of your hair to work with the same
Not to find some plumbers were too many;
No, nothing, not even for things
Very bright and scatt’ring, like the original.
Even the faces and angel wings
Through the air, they do not wear bear fruit still pure, and not purely
______
There’s a couple of things that need to be kept in mind when one tries this out. First, you have to be careful about the languages you select as your filters. The point here, in trying to find a starting point for a poem, is to arrive at a text that is wildly divergent from the original. I think it’s safe to say that Not to find some plumbers were too many bares absolutely no resemblance to John Donne’s verse. So here’s some criteria to think over.
- Select a base text that’s rich in idiom or metaphor or both. Idiom and metaphor make translating poetry extremely hard. Internet translators are robots, essentially, and do not understand either. A computer will always go for the literal translation. That always leaves the door open for gross misinterpretation. (Speaking of idioms, I remember talking to a German who heard “Get your shit together” for the first time, and he was bewildered — picturing actually gathering his excrament into a pile).
- You have to very your languages with each step. English is a Germanic language. So, if your chain of filters goes from English to German to Dutch to Frisian to Afrikaans back to English, you might not get absolutely wild results. Those languages are historically and structurally related. It’s better to go from English to Arabic to Chinese to Russian to Swahili back to English. This is because the languages are so fundamentally different from each other, from grammar to diction and syntax. Basically, by using those differences, you’re opening your self to a wider possibility of weirder pairing of words.
I have been thinking of Dana Gioia, a lot, as of late — but not the formalist poet of Interogations at Noon or the critic responsible for Can Poetry Matter? I haven’t even thought of his tenure helming the National Endowment for the Humanities. For me, it’s something a lot more basic and complex at the same time. Dana Gioia has lived a double life, that as a man wholly absorbed in the arts, and that of a business executive who once had a career in corporate America. That was something I used to laugh at, quite a bit, thinking the sides were wholly incompatible Of course, life turns and bites you on the ass. I laugh at Dana Gioia no longer.
He and I are nothing alike. He was an exec at General Foods. I’m a peon hourly manager overwhelmed by a dysfunctional automotive department at a New Jersey Wal*Mart. Gioia left his corporate life for that of the arts. I, on the other hand, spent close to a decade trying to get a full time job in academia, only to have some bullshit happen every time I got close — always the adjunct, never the full time instructor. I left academia because Wal*Mart would provide some much needed stability, and it has. So much so, I have been actively contemplating trying to climb the management ladder. Sometimes, I think of trying to go back, just to teach a night class or two, and other times, I just cross my arms and say, “Fuck that noise.”
Despite my everchanging temperament at work, there’s one thing I’ve learned to identify with Dana Gioia, and that’s strange aspect of living and leading a double life. I am, quite easily, the most educated person in my store. I don’t say that to be snooty; I say that as a matter of fact. I have two masters degrees in a place where many people are viaing for an associates in their off time. Since this is Wal*Mart we’re talking about, the notable exception is the amount of senior citizens and older Americans on their second or third career. When I was first hired, the Asst. Manager supervising me had an MFA in photography, so she could relate to my situation — although her life was complicated and compounded by Hurricane Katrina and how it had leveled her home in New Orleans. But, there are very few people — and she was one of the exceptions — that I share my background with. This is practical, because many of the people I work with will not understand my circumstances. Nor will they care.
I remember, a long time back, learning that I had sold my book length poem “Wood Life” to a publisher (And, trust me, a few glitches, but that sucker’s going to be out soon). The news came to me via blackberry. I was giddy, so giddy that I had shed my hard face for a broad smile. A co-worker asked my why I was so happy, and I tried to explain, and they just shook their head and walked away. That interaction reminded me of my core principle and retail work ethic: I’m not there to make friends or impress people — I’m there to do my 8-9 hours of wage-labor and then go the fuck home, try to write something, work on publishing somebody else’s books, and kiss my wife as much as she’ll let me.
But, I cannot change who I am. And I’m not going to lie about who I am. So, eventually, the dreaded discussion always comes up. Usually, the response is: “I never pegged you as that sort of guy.” Collegiate types, I’ve been told, are effete types who complain about the brand and variety of soymilk in their lattes and use words like “Antidisestablishmentarianism” while pondering the sexual state of commas in Jane Austen novels. Apparently, they’re not six foot two men who don’t have problems lifting a lot of boxes. Mind you, this discussion only concerns educational experience — throw in the word “poetry” and discussion becomes even more tedious for me, in terms of wading people’s misconceptions
So, yes, it is a double life. Maybe not to the same specifications as the one Dana Gioia led at General Foods, but in the but it’s one none the less. The strange thing, however, is that I’ve grown to like it. Sometimes, I think I’ll never go back to teaching. The beauty of working at a Wal*Mart is that the bullshit stays in the store. You don’t take the store home and grade it, and you certainly don’t have to spend your weekend trying to figure what to do in the coming week, and writing lesson plans/lecture notes. Even better, if you work hard and try not to be an asshole, the management tends to notice, in terms of getting raises. Whereas, over in academia, department chairs will fall all over themselves to praise you, and give you a feeling of comfort and possibility, but in the end, you’re still and adjunct, in a department crammed full fo them, and the prospect of being anything other than an adjunct are slim with too few opportunities and more than enough qualified people to staff thos opportunites six times over.
Line breaks in free verse are important, and you choose to break a line can change the meaning of everything. Consider for a moment:
It is 8:28 am and I have eaten.
People no longer crowd the eisles.
There are two things, as a reader of poetry, that do not impress me about the above. First, lines are end-stopped, halting the reader at the end of the line. So, it’s an extra long reading pause. Plus, those line endings do absolutely nothing artistically. So, consider this slight alteration.
It is 8:28 am and I have eaten. People
no longer crowd the eisles.
Changing that one little linebreak alters everything, suggesting a sense of cannibalism that was not in the first set of lines. This is why, of course, it’s always important to look at each line of free verse as single unit, no matter where the punctuation rests. So, imagine the giddy sense of naughtiness I managed to sneak into a poem (“I Will Survive”) that was solicited from me, for the anthology Dead Bells.
blown. I wish I was
The line before is about people and their kazoos. The line after is about dancing to Gloria Gaynor. Certainly, that section of the poem doesn’t overtly suggest or preoccupy itself with oral sex, but this line does — even more, it speaks to the inherent loneliness of the speaker, who’s woken up in a gay bar, only to find that the world has ended and everybody around him is dead. Of course, I can’t really quote more of the poem, partly because that anthology hasn’t been published yet.
In a successful free verse poem, no line is haphazard, and even though it doesn’t appear that way, the line breaks are highly calculated. Of course, this is but one lineation strategies of many, but over time, it’s become one of my favorites.
If there’s anything that drives me bonkers about poetry, it’s the baseless allegation that free verse is “Tennis without the net” (Yeah, I’m looking you Robert Frost). Poetry is intensely metaphorical, but in a contemporary sense, it’s also very richly based in evocative image. One could easily assert the influence of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams to this extent, and the aesthetic that they tried to import from centuries old Asian Formalism. However, it’s not as always cut and dried that way. German language modernism also has had it’s share of notables, and perhaps, in terms of popularity, Rilke has overshadowed a good many poets. That’s a shame, because Georg Trakl, like Williams, has written a sort of image based poetry that certainly helps explain the nuts and bolts of writing poetry. Consider the following Trakl poem:
Mourning
The dark eagles, sleep and death,
Rustle all night around my head:
The golden statue of man
Is swallowed by the icy comber
Of eternity. On the frightening reef
The purple remains go to pieces,
And the dark voice mourns
Over the sea.
Sister in my wild despair
Look, a precarious skiff is sinking
Under the stars,
The face of night whose voice is fading.
It is not my intent to pick this apart and scrutinize it under the lens of a close reading. For the moment, I’m interested in what the poem is actually doing on the page. Each line offers an image, and to some respect that image comes off as a resonate idea. The first line gives the reader “dark eagles” and assigns them a metaphorical status of “sleep” and “death.” The next line has the eagles doing something: “Rustling” all night around the speaker’s head. We know, because of the abstraction, that “Sleep” and “death” concern the speaker, but the image falling into place is that of a man in bed with eagles flying around him. So, we can safely assume that he’s more than just bothered by “sleep” and “death.” The next line shifts, giving the reader a completely new image, one not fully explained like the “dark eagles” were. But this is how the poem develops, line by line, image stacked onto another image. There really is no explanation in the poem, either. It’s a string of images, and to glean meaning out of it, you have to pick through Trakl’s juxtapositions. However, the sequencing of images is hardly random. Trakl’s lines are not the result of a word blender, or some Dadaist exercise.
Notably, a reader does see this often in a lot of Williams’ poetry. Resonate imagery, image sequence, and not a lot of explanation sometimes are notable in his work, especially the shorter poems. (And having quoted “The Red Wheelbarrow” to death in my lifetime, here’s a different Williams poem):
The Great Figure
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
In the name of fairness, William’s poem strikes a little more simplistic, by the dynamic is the same. The reader is offered a string of images, broken into units of lines. There’s hardly a lot of abstraction here, as Williams doesn’t actively explain the meaning of it all. He’s just giving the reader a fire truck in a dark city. We as readers, then have to pick the imagery apart and consider every word to arrive at a greater meaning. We see this at work elsewhere with Williams all the time:
Between Walls
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
Frequent charges against Trakl and Williams are: they write poetry that is wildly too simplistic. Writing nothing but imagery, it seems, is not profound enough for some readers, especially those used to Shakespearean pontificating (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?). However, what both Trakl and Williams accomplish is finding a totally new language to speak in. There is no such thing as a meaningless image, and figuring out what a poet is trying to say, especially when they’re speaking in imagery, becomes a lot harder. Meaning isn’t being spoon-fed, but it’s presented in a way that demands closer scrutiny. So, despite the deceptive simplicity, this sort of poetry is a lot harder to pick apart, because unlike with some lyric poetry, the poet isn’t digesting it for you.
It seems you can’t go far on the internet without running into some reference about how Twitter is revolutionizing literature. You know, the idea that a writer has only a fixed amount of characters, and that is charging writers to become more and more economical with language ever before — that brevity is becoming quite a fashion. I would also class this with the “shrinking attention span” argument that people have often lobbed at MTV music videos, as well as a the amount of content advertisers can cram into a 30 or 60 minute spot. Recently, one sees this with a proposed “Hint Fiction” anthology to be published by WW Norton. The rationale of “Hint Fiction has been laid out here, and here’s an excerpt:
Me, I want to coin a term, so I’m going to do it here and now: those very, very, very, VERY short stories should be called Hint Fiction. Because that’s all the reader is ever given. Just a hint. Not a scene, or a setting, or even a character sketch. They are given a hint, nothing more, and are asked — nay, forced — to fill in the blanks. And believe me, there are a lot of blanks.
Um. That’s definately not fiction. That is not fiction by a long stretch. It’s poetry. Specifically, it’s prose poetry. Fiction is usually the art of narrative — it’s the art of (experimentalism aside for a moment) of telling a story. Once one gets into the act of “hinting” at something, while leaving the mechanics, nuts, and bolts of fiction, one is venturing into poetic territory. Forget about the formal aspects that come with the history of poetry and verse for a moment. Poetry has always been about the artful, creative use of language. Creative writing teachers usually say, “Forget about making overt political points with poetry; if you want to do that, write an essay.” And they’re right. Poetry is a medium dependent not only on metaphor, but on compressing or panoramically expanding language in ways to hint at greater meaning. This is why, for example, readers can approach writers like Dylan Thomas, Robert Creeley, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, A.R. Ammons, or William Carlos Williams and come away with vastly different interpretations.
But, there’s something more. It seems some people want to go at lengths to credit Twitter with bringing the notion or idea of brevity to writers. But then again, if you read works of “hint fiction” with an eye towards literary history, one will quickly find that this aesthetic is nothing new. “Hint Fiction” is not the cutting edge, especially if you look at the history of poetry. Lets start with the obvious.
Asian Formalism.
If anything values subtlety and hinting its classical Asian Poetry.
1) Haiku/Senryu
Forget what your high school English teacher taught you. Haiku has nothing to do with 5-7-5 syllabics. Sure, that’s the syllabic pattern in Japanese, where polysyllabic words or the norm. 17 English syllables can get rather wordy, and so adhering to 5-7-5 violates the minimalist spirit of haiku in Japanese. Haiku was only meant to be a poetic form contstrained by the length of one human breath. It has to have a seasonal reference, and if it doesn’t then it ends up becoming senryu, haiku’s usually comic close cousin. Asia has other classical forms that are similar, as the Korean sijo comes to mind, as does the five line Japanese tanka. Yet, brevity is the norm with all of them. To illustrate this, here is a poem by the great Matsuo Basho:
The old pond;
A frog jumps in —
The sound of the water.
And here’s a tanka:
HEAR the stag’s pathetic call
Far up the mountain side,
While tramping o’er the maple leaves
Wind-scattered far and wide
This sad, sad autumn tide.
–Saru Maru
Here is a Korean sijo:
Do you still sleep in this valley,
at rest under thriving grass?
Where have those rosy cheeks gone,
do your bleached bones remember?
I brought good wine for us to share—
Here, I’ll pour it on the grass.
–Im Che
So, there are certain aesthetics in each of these. A crisp sense of imager, and OH YEAH, they hint at meanings not readily there and laid out for the reader. Of course, it’s often quite vogue to point to Asian lit for examples of brevity and subtlety in action, but Western Culture is not without it’s precedent too. There’s always the epigram, which often came as a brief, clever statement. There’s a tradition of this dating back to the Greeks. In modern poetry, that has evolved into a single lined poetic form called the monostitch. Here’s one by the late A. R. Ammons:
- COWARD
- Bravery runs in my family.
Hint Fiction has it’s predecessors, and last I read a history book or two, Matsuo Basho or the Latin poet Martial didn’t have computers, the internet, or Twitter squeezing their attention spans. A sense of minimalism has always been with literature. “Hint Fiction” is in act nothing new — it’s just a prose variant on what’s come before. That said, I’ve been filling out a notebook during my lunch breaks at WalMart, in hopes of submitting something. Sure, I quibble a little, but I don’t bregrudge the editors of hint fiction. In fact, despite all of these objections, I still plan on bying the book once it’s finished
Okay. Now that I’ve finished a draft of Wood Life, I find that the itch to write a long poem hasn’t gone away. So, I’m going to take a crack at something new. Goal: 75 pages. Subject: Serial Stalking.
Obsessive and crazy, in poetry, often translates into a prosody that’s often repetitive. So, I think I’m going to try my hand and monkeying around with form. To some, “experimental poetry” means Oulipo and Language Poetry. In fact, messing around with centuries old forms, whether whole sale are just tweaking is a slight be experimental. Take the sestina, for example. It’s a fixed form where line ending words must repeat. Here’s and example from John Ashbery. Poets.org explains a little better how the form works:
The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:
1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACEThe envoi, sometimes known as the tornada, must also include the remaining three end-words, BDF, in the course of the three lines so that all six recurring words appear in the final three lines. In place of a rhyme scheme, the sestina relies on end-word repetition to effect a sort of rhyme.
Now, there’s a way to play with form there to create something new. Use the same ordering technique, but use a different number of lines. So, if you make a slight change of 8 lines instead of 6, and follow it until the pattern starts over, this is what you get:
12345678
81726354
48513762
24687531
Four eight line stanzas, possibly with the ending envoi being four lines instead of three. He hereby dub that an “Octina.” You can follow this pattern with any set of numbers, so long as stanza contains an even number of lines.
It’s late, and I really don’t have the time to read this with the attention it needs. But, for every “cutting edge” avant garde movement, a counter-movement usually springs up. So, in the wake of Language Poetry, there’s apparently something called “Post Language Poetry.” I would wonder what Majorie Perloff thinks of all of that, but… meh … later.
Sometimes, when you’ve come to writing through academia, you tend to be starkly aware of how the reading world is divided into many, many camps — sometimes, hostile with each other. By this, I mean what is literary and what is popular. Toss in genre distinctions, and it can get even worse. As in: You like horror garbage? I myself only read Nicholas Sparks. As if Nicholas Sparks is the paradigm of what is good and nourishing. Meanwhile, somebody in an English Department, somewhere, is pointing and laughing at the Nicholas Sparks reader, resting on their stead diet of Milan Kundera and James Joyce. For me, the alleged discord among readers reminds me of my favorite David Lehman quote, and since I’m too lazy to look it up, here’s a paraphrase: The only thing keeping English departments together is the mutual hatred of literature. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I tend to think that could be extrapolated to the reading world in general.
But, why can’t somebody, to employ a cliche, have their cake and eat it too. My academic background is in poetry. I realized that, as much as I love genre fiction, I had been missing something by largely ignoring the poetry world for the past four years. But it all comes back to one other thing — words like literary or popular fiction do not matter in the long run. When you boil it down to it’s minimum, “Pop culture” is still a part of culture.
And that’s why I love the following quote so much. Stephen King said this, while accepting recognition at the National Book Awards. It’s a good bit of advice to follow:
But giving an award like this to a guy like me suggests that in the future things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been. Bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction. The first gainers in such a widening of interest would be the readers, of course, which is us because writers are almost always readers and listeners first. You have been very good and patient listeners and I’m going to let you go soon but I’d like to say one more thing before I do.
Tokenism is not allowed. You can’t sit back, give a self satisfied sigh and say, “Ah, that takes care of the troublesome pop lit question. In another twenty years or perhaps thirty, we’ll give this award to another writer who sells enough books to make the best seller lists.” It’s not good enough. Nor do I have any patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in saying they’ve never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer.
What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?
Jerrod Balzer, mackeral eater, writer, and editor at Skullvines Press, has a pretty good piece on why self publishing is bad. Here’s an excerpt:
I also learned why self-publishing is such a bad deal. When you go this route with your work, you eliminate the opportunity to go through the proper channels. You need those rejections from submitting over and over. You need the constructive criticism to help grow as a writer. You need to learn through many rewrites until your work is accepted. As perfect as I’d thought OAK CLAN was back then, I look at it now and see all kinds of issues.
Furthermore, once a book has been self-published, no legitimate publisher (as in one that pays you), will take your work seriously. It raises too many red flags. The work is automatically lumped together with all the countless unedited pieces of crap that are out there. It will be assumed that you, like others, just stuck your first draft out there in book form.
Rich Ristow 