Perloff, Marjorie. “The Oulipo Factor: the Procedural Poetics of Christan Bök and Caroline Bergvall.” Textual Practice 18.1 (2004): 23-45.
I rarely delve into poetry here. It’s not a form of literature I am very familiar with. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to really appreciate a lot of poetry, and I’ve always been more into narrative work. But this article came up in a database search (“oulipo” being my generic search term). After reading it, I saw a post Bud wrote about prose poems, and the two connected in my mind.
The main point of Perloff’s article, as I understand it, is to use the work of Bök and Bergvall as an example of contemporary poetry that unlike many other poets foregrounds the use of “rhythmic figure, sound structure, and visual configuration,” rather than those produced with “sonic indifference” content to “call texts poems merely because they are lineated.” (43)
She starts by discussing Jacques Roubaud’s book on the alexandrine (being the 12 syllable line that is the classic French verse form (more prevalent than iambic pentameter in English)) and a few oulipians projects (Marcel Benabou’s permutations of alexandrines, Mathews’ 35 translations of “to be or not to be”). She does this to point out that sound and syntax are vital to meaning (the ways Mathew’s alters the phrase makes it drastically change in meaning).
The next section of the paper is the most interesting to me. She takes the beginnings of seven randomly selected poems written in the 1990’s from the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. To make the point that they are little more than “lineated prose” she transposes them into paragraphs. Lo and behold, they read like the beginnings of stories. She argues that the close attention to and foregrounding of sound and syntax is being neglected and that poetry has become more about content (“ironized narrative… personal expression of a particular insight” (31)). She pulls out a passage from “Tintern Abbey’ to point out the way the content is echoed in the sound and syntax of the poem (she glosses this in a sentence or two).
But she is not merely recalling the past and saying we should return, for she next brings out Bök’s Eunoia as an example of contemporary poetry. She takes a brief look at the various constraints involved in the volume, as well as a look at the way the lipograms create different “semantic overtones”. An interesting analysis that is also rather obvious to the reader of the book.
She goes on then to the work of Caroline Bergvall, which I won’t get into, as I am not at all familiar with her work and found that section of the essay less interesting. Though I may look up her “Via: 48 Dante Variations” which uses 48 different translations of the opening of the Inferno.
This has me thinking about how we define “poetry.” I don’t see Bök’s Eunoia as poetry, rather I see it as prose. Perhaps I base my definition of poetry too much on line breaks, on the formal arrangement of the words (though I didn’t notice, until Perloff mentioned it, that each page in Eunoia is the same number of lines (well the same number within each chapter)).
Looking at a some definitions of poetry, they seem to focus on a few elements: sound (including meter and rhythm), visual form, rhetorical figures (syntax), and theme. I think it’s safe to throw out theme, as poetry does not hold the copyright on any particular theme. For the three that remain one can’t say that prose does not use any of those elements, but we could say that poetry foregrounds those elements more so than prose. Which to my mind puts poetry on a sliding scale with prose.
Can we say at what point the sound, form and rhetoric of a work is such that it crosses from prose to poetry? That becomes a hard question the further one investigates. For instance, David Markson’s most recent novels are visually organized in such a way that they are almost poetic (very short one or two sentence paragraphs predominate), and while there is no rhythm as such to the individual sentences there is a rhythm between the passages. Does this make it poetry? The lack of blatant narrative may move some opinions to the poetry side. What about This is Not a Novel? If we listen to the author: if it is not a novel, what is it? Is it poetry? If another author says his work is poetry is it?
Going back to Bud’s post, is it a prose poem because the author (or a journal) says it is? What about a poetic prose? What makes a prose poem a poem at all.
I’m also wondering about the effect of constraints on all this. If a work of prose is highly constrained it will start to move into the poetry side of the scale. Depending on the constraints, visual organization, sound, and rhetorical figures will become more and more prominent in the work (which is how I see Eunoia).
I’m going to stop here, as I feel I’ve already gone on a long time and probably not said anything very clear. Comments are, as usual, appreciated.