Two by Ian Monk
Writings for the Oulipo by Ian Monk. Make Now Press, 2006. 68p.
Famiy Archaeology and Other Poems by Ian Monk. Make Now Press, 2006. 80p.
Ian Monk is an English member of the Oulipo, mostly known as a translator. In these two books we find some of his non-translated work, mostly poems. Both are highly constrained books, most, if not all, of the works are written under some constraint (not always obvious).
Writings for the Oulipo contains 15 short works, starting off with “Homage to Perec” a series of six univocalisms, that is texts written using only one vowel (one for each and “y”). The first part is a translation of Perec’s “What a Man!”. The “E” univocalism is an short essay called “Perec’s Letterless Texts” which discusses three of Perec’s text (the aforementioned, “What a Man”, the novella Les Revenentes (translated by Monk as The Exeter Text) and La Disparition (known in English as A Void)) using only “e” words. It’s a great example of a constrained non-fiction work. An even better example is Monk’s essay on Gilbert Adair’s translation of Perec’s La Disparation. Not only does he insightfully discuss different problems with the translation, where Adair seems to have added much embellishment to the text, but Monk ends it by revealing that the essay itself was written without any ‘e’s (just like Perec’s novel).
Another stand-out text is one entitled “Twin Towers”. The words are formatted into two columns per page. The first column mostly lists objects in a building, while the second column lists types of people in the building (though it really isn’t that demarcated, I generalize). Over the course of four pages, the two columns get shorter and shorter (wider top margin), and on that forth page the second column is displaced, tilted at an angle on the page. An obvious piece about September 11th, it is actually the best such piece I’ve read. Something about the mundane listing of objects and people combined with the visual layout makes for a powerful short prose work.
Many of the rest of the works are less interesting to me. Lots of tightly constrained poetry, like the threnodial, sestanagramina, and sonnets as well as a few short prose pieces of indeterminable (at least to me) constraints. The book ends with a series of 39 brief vignettes of sexual liaisons involving three people, similar to Mathews’ “Singular Pleasures”.
Family Archaeology and Other Poems is a collection of 9 constrained (at least I’m assuming most or all of them are) poems. The titular piece has an interesting format. It starts out with two verses, each containing two lines of two words of two letters. The second section has three verses of three lines of three words of three letters. And so on, up to the section of tens.
I don’t have much of anything to see about the poems. As readers of this blog may know, I’m not much of a poetry reader, so I’m not one to judge.
Tags: Constraint, oulipo
Entries RSS
2 Comments
Jump to comment form | comments rss [?]