According to Christian Bök, there are four ways to be a poet. A lyric poet typically intends to express a thought or a feeling. It is possible, however, “to express oneself unintentionally—surrealist writing, automatic writing, and stream of consciousness,” Bök says. “Also, Ginsberg at his most rapturous, ‘first thought, best thought’—outbursts of feeling that aren’t meditative.” A third category of poet cares primarily about intention—having a plan, that is, and seeing it through. These poets use constraints to produce poems that aren’t necessarily expressive. An example is a poem written using the avant-garde technique N+7, in which a poet takes out certain words in a piece of writing and replaces each with the seventh word following it in the dictionary. A poet named Rosmarie Waldrop did this with the Declaration of Independence and produced a satirical piece that begins, “We holler these trysts to be self-exiled.” The fourth category includes appropriation—giving an existing text a new form.
Bök said that in Buffalo they had talked about “
limit cases in writing,”
and that there were
four:
1) the ready-made text,
2) the mannerist text,
3) the
illegible text, and the
4) unauthored text.
The ready-made text was a
plagiarized text, like “Day.” The mannerist text was written according
to a constraint that made proceeding difficult—for example, a book
without the letter “e.” “The idea came from a French movement of writers
and mathematicians in the nineteen-sixties, called Oulipo,” Bök said.
The illegible text included concrete poetry, a hybrid of visual and
literary art in which words tend to portray an image, so that a poem
about an angel might be printed in the form of an angel’s wings.
Unauthored books are written by computers and are “like rolling the dice
for words,” Bök said. If they move a reader, it is by means of uncanny
associations and the sense that they read as if written by a person.
“Language poetry was the period at the
end of the modernist sentence,” Goldsmith said. Language poets believed
that the meaning words held was as important as the way they were used.
“It challenged the reader to take fragments of language and reassemble them, so that the reader becomes the author of the text,” he continued.
“The modernist project, beginning with Mallarmé, in the eighteen-hundreds, down through Joyce and Pound and Stein and language poets, in the seventies, had always been to deconstruct language to its smallest shard.
Finally, language got so atomized that there was nothing left to do. It was language as grains of sand.”
“It challenged the reader to take fragments of language and reassemble them, so that the reader becomes the author of the text,” he continued.
“The modernist project, beginning with Mallarmé, in the eighteen-hundreds, down through Joyce and Pound and Stein and language poets, in the seventies, had always been to deconstruct language to its smallest shard.
Finally, language got so atomized that there was nothing left to do. It was language as grains of sand.”
“It got pulverized to death,” Bök said. “Conceptual poetry is born out of this discussion.”
Bök became known for constraint-based writing. His collection “Eunoia,”
published in 2001, has five sections. Each allows only one vowel. It
took Bök seven years to write “Eunoia,” which was a best-seller in
Canada and in England. It begins, “Awkward grammar appals a craftsman.”
***
Conceptual poems are the result of their method. A lyric poem might pass
through many versions before arriving at its final form; a conceptual
poem has only one version.
***
"...the point of being a poet is to establish an “idiosyncratic lyric
practice that can’t be assimilated into the practice of others,” a
critic told me, adding that poetry derives from a writer’s consideration
of his own “sensual, moral, intellectual, aesthetic” concerns."
***
