Article Title：The Oulipo factor: The procedural poetics of Christian Bok and Caroline Bergvall
Abstract：
The French Oulipo (Ouvroir de literature 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 Micehl Benabou, for example, collected hundred of alexandrines, broke them into hemistichs and recombined the latter so as to created 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 dAlexandre, 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-centered, slack, unpoetic free verse that has become ubiquitous. The cardinal rules 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 of the work of two younger poets, the Canadian Christian Bok and the English poet Caroline Bergvall. Boks euonia is an inverted lipgram, 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 demonstrated what sound repetition does and can do in poetry. Bergvalls VIA, a rule-governed sequence based on translations of the first tercet of Dantes 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: Oulipo; free verse; constraint; alexandrine; prosody; lipogram; poetic form; procedural verse; Bergvall; Bok; Roubaud
DOI: 10.1080/0950236042000183250
Source：TEXTUAL PRACTICE
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