The Oulipo factor: the procedural poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall

Abstract

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.