[Wgcp-whc] Minutes from meetings with Christian Bök (10/26 and 11/02)

[Jean-Jacques Poucel]

Dear Friends,

I would like to report on the recent Working Group discussions with  
the Canadian poet Christian Bök. Before doing so allow me to remind  
active participants that our next meeting is scheduled for November  
30th, 3-5pm. On that occasion we will be meeting at the Beinecke  
Library to discuss the work of Marianne Moore with Patricia Willis,  
Curator of American Literature. Please stay posted for additional  
information about the proposed readings.

Also, Thursday November 15th, this coming week, poets Graham Foust  
and Elizabeth Robinson will give a joint reading at the Beinecke  
Library. The reading begins at 4pm, it is open to the public, and it  
will be followed by a reception. You are hereby invited to attend.   
(Further details about the work of these two poets may be found at  
the end of these minutes).

Now to my report, where I’ll refer to recent Working Group activities  
with a perforated sense for ordering the way things happened—a self  
interrupting memory at work will allow for such extravagance.

On October 26th, members from the working group met to discuss  
Eunoia, the Griffin Poetry Prize winning univocal lipogramatic poem- 
novel that Christian Bök published in 2001. The fruit of “seven years  
of perseverance,” this book attempts to use 98% of the single-vowel  
lexicons Bök culled from the Webster’s 3rd Ed. Unabridged Dictionary  
(which he chose over the OED because it contains more scientific  
terminology), stitching them into five semi-narrative chapters, one  
for each vowel (A, E, I, O, U).

Initial reactions from group members could not have been more  
divided; some loved the book, others hated it. Insofar as readers  
remained stuck on constraint, there was a tendency to reduce the work  
itself to gimmickry, a flamboyant flourish of lettered virtuosity  
deprived of a genuinely compelling reflection on (personal)  
experience. Insofar as readers embraced the texture of each page for  
its sound above all, the experience of reading was given to all sorts  
of ancillary reflections, including posing problems of genre, voice,  
and emergent/descriptive metaphors.

While considering the initial critique, we reveled at the way the  
work foresees and in fact already triumphs this very line of  
rejection. This anticipation of the critical eye is quite prominent  
in the opening passages of Chapter I : “Writing is inhibiting.  
Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing  
nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks— 
impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. […] I dismiss nitpicking  
criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz—[…]  
dismissing simplistic thinking in which philippic wit is still  
illicit” (50). Gestures of self-deprecation seems to take on the  
character of a manifesto in the book’s dedication —“to the new /  
ennui in you” (7)— and in the deviant slogan attributed to Derren  
Wershler-Henry before the book’s afterword: “The tedium is the  
message” (103); that is, what provokes rejection is precisely the  
fact that the constraint remains opaque, a constant (and superficial)  
obstacle to more engrossing content—the book’s paratext constructs  
that stiff-arm distance as one of its most committed rhetorical moves.

As we considered elements that delighted us in the work’s attention  
to sound (often pausing to read aloud), we enjoyed discovering how  
diverse the music of each vowel, and we paid homage to the scriptor’s  
skill in tying together so rich a context (both in terms of the  
intertextual references that were made apparent, and in terms of the  
thematic constraints that recur in each chapter: e.g. maritime  
travel, gastronomy, sexual endeavor, etc.). Group members confessed  
to having favored one chapter over others while reading. Praise was  
emitted over the use of so many rare and beautiful words. The  
existence of additional, number-based constraints were guessed at.  
And thus, the conversation recursively wended back to the central  
fact of labor, the thoroughgoing toil that must have entered the  
building of this book letter by letter, an element that is detailed  
in all of its late-night, post-graduate-student-angst-enriched glory,  
in the afterword, as if part of an increasingly explicit personal  
mythopoesis.

While as a group we enjoyed thinking about the manner in which the  
vowel in each lexicon would conspire to tell its own story in the  
process of composition—a revelation Bök describes in his recent  
Postmodern Culture interview—, a couple of detailed points taken from  
our reading of the book in conjunction with the interview complicated  
what might otherwise have been felicitously read as an attempt to  
‘yield the initiative to words’ themselves, to let the personality of  
each lexicon (of language itself) dictate the direction and tone of  
each chapter.

The first objection is that the value of poetic process (writing and  
reading), as it is represented by Bök, risks being reduced to nothing  
more than a game of one-upmanship, a dynamic that is already deeply  
inflected within constraint based writing generally, where  
inspiration is “programmable” (according to Bök’s ‘Pataphysics: The  
Poetics of an Imaginary Science), as well as elsewhere in the  
extended poetic tradition (contests are part of poetic life from the  
medieval age to the contemporary). When asked about his favorite  
contemporary poets, Bök cites Kenneth Godsmith as “the man to beat.”  
If the selected opponent is appropriately formidable, what struck  
some group members as particularly regrettable is in the turn of  
phrase: that the agonistic character of poetry should bear such  
importance, that competition would be defined and confined to  
increasingly explicit formal and thematic elements of the text,  
without taking into account how those sophistications actually  
motivated the meaning of that work, or what contribution they make to  
the greater field of experimental (and normative) poetics and their  
place in the world.

We linked this discussion to the opening passage of Chapter E, a  
passage that may be read as much as a metapoetic commentary as a  
mythopoetic program: “We see the revered exegete reject metered verse  
[…] He rebels. He sets new precedents. He lets cleverness exceed  
decent levels. He eschews the esteemed genres, the expected themes.  
[…] He engenders perfect newness wherever we need fresh terms” (31).  
En effet, within the confines of very self-conscious constraint based  
writing, there is indeed a kind of arms race (e.g.- who will be the  
one to write the longest (and most elegant) palindrome?) and it is  
almost natural (predictable) to (re)knit that competitive spirit to  
the nihilism associated with the brightest avatar’s of the avant- 
garde, Beckett’s advice in Westward Ho to “Fail again. Fail better.”  
In other words, even if there are considerable limitations imposed by  
the constraint here, Bök manages to put what’s there to use in the  
service an explicitly motivated and manifesting negative poetics.  
Adopting a starkly anti-lyrical voice, “he eschews expected themes,”  
or says he will; all the while he retells tales of Helen from the  
Trojan wars, and composes paragraphs rife with delicious syllables  
and pit pleasing smut—this paradox complicates the way “the rebel  
peddles these theses,” it adds a kind of vulnerability under the  
hardened ironic voice that plays at portraying its own process as  
“depthless pretense” (32).

The second point emerged from considering how working under  
constraint affects notions of inspiration. We suggested that it was  
crutch, a kind of mask, a safety net in its own right, one that  
places some limited faith in the execution of a proof, however  
arbitrary the question might be (whatever else it will be, the text  
will have demonstrated a solution to a problem). We also underlined  
that since it is the generative process of the writing that we could  
not lose sight of, what is glorified in the writer here is first and  
foremost his skill as craftsman, his handiwork. We wondered how Bök  
would react to our comparing this work to the craft of needlepoint  
(which is often used to decorate and protect the soft underbelly of a  
pillow, for example), a hand-made tale stitched for show among a  
super select coterie of like-minded craft artists (after all, the  
French word ouvroir, so prominent in Oulipo (ouvroir de literature  
potentielle), denotes first and foremost a sewing workshop). This  
metaphor is all the more enjoyable to imagine considering Eunoia has  
sold over 20,000 copies; the dream come true/deepest fear of any  
cottage industry. Again, what’s beguiling about Bök’s book is that  
while it may take as its direct addressees (and claim its heritage  
among) some of the more extreme conceptual artists known, its  
currency among the general public runs more rapidly that Warhol’s  
Campbell soup sreenprints.

While the better part of that initial discussion was devoted to  
Eunoia, we did begin discussing Christian’s current project, based on  
Xenotext, the file he sent along for our consideration. Elaborating  
on William S. Burrough’s declaration that “the word is now a virus,”  
this work-in-progress consists of genetically engineering a poem-text  
into the DNA of a radiation resistant organism (the bacteria  
Deinococcus radiodurans) in such a fashion that the RNA produced  
using the encrypted DNA sequence will constitute an equally “heart  
breaking” poem. In other words, Bök aspires to make a living organism  
into a machine for making poetry. When Christian talked about this  
project during his November 2nd visit to the Working Group, he  
revealed one of the arguments he uses to secure funding for the  
project—it is a collaborative endeavor embarked upon with MacArthur  
Fellow and biochemist, Stuart A. Kaufman—, namely that once they are  
completed and encoded into the targeted organism, these poems may  
very well exist and continue reproducing themselves long after the  
disappearance of the human race. Immortality through art?

On the occasion of our first discussion (10/26), we recognized, not  
without some admiration, that this conceptual poetics engages with  
(and pushes the limits of) even highly experimental notions of  
literature and, more broadly, art itself.  Deep concerns, however,  
were expressed about the consequence of what was described as a  
slippery slope of epistemological translations, transpositions, and  
displacements: if code (or encrypted DNA), which remains unreadable  
to the naked eye, is taken as poetry, then much—if not all—of the  
dialogic character of literature will have been abandoned. This  
seeming disregard for the character of human understanding  
problematizes for several group members the ethical commitment  
subtending this ambitious incursion into the poetics of biochemistry.

The first question a group member posed in response to Bök’s live  
description of his Xenotext (11/02): “If no one is around to hear it,  
does a falling tree make a sound?”  This seemed to be a non-problem  
problem for Bök who brazenly admitted to liking above all music made  
by machines for machines. Intent on outdoing what has been achieved  
in Eunoia, Bök claims to worry very little about a modern day  
readership for the poem itself (in some sense its final addressees  
are not in fact contemporary humans, but post apocalyptic intelligent  
life (alien or not)); perhaps having already had more readers than  
most contemporary poets would know what to do with has had some  
liberating effects. Still, he described pursuing his Xenotext  
experiment in a variety of practical and pragmatic ways, including :  
1. The process of designing a computer program that is helping him  
select the most propitious DNA lexicon (and propitious will have been  
defined as the cipher that allows for the most ‘moving’ translation  
into the RNA (or protein) sequence); 2. planning a final publication  
that will include a description of the compositional procedures, a  
copy of both poems, some analysis of the cipher selected (those  
eschewed), and, as part of the book, a microscope ready slide  
containing the germ itself, a primer for the scientific inspection of  
the bacterial-lyric by the general public.

Discussion of this project underlined the extent to which Bök  
fashions himself as a conceptual provocateur. While occasionally  
pretending to bracket humanist values, his often polemical remarks  
incisively clamor for a repositioning of poetry against, within, and  
before the leading contemporary epistemologies, most prominently  
scientific discourse. For the record, I will list some of those  
claims here. Bök dismisses slam poetry events as a poor excuse for  
authors who lack the talent (or grit) to go toe-to-toe with the  
masters of (pseudo)socially conscious rhyming, today’s top hip-hop  
artists. He challenges poets to redeem the relevance of their art by  
breaking into and incursively appropriating discourses where truth,  
its relation to the human, are not only in question, but under rapid  
development world-wide. He decries that fact poets remain confined to  
the category of the quaint, the dépassé realm of contemporary  
culture; and, in the same breath, he laments the fact that no one has  
yet written the beautiful epic poems occasioned by our journey to  
moon. He praises the work of Kenneth Goldsmith—whose writing, despite  
being reduced to two “constraints” (1. never writing a single  
original word (i.e. working entirely from citation, pastiche,  
collage) and 2. selecting only the flattest, most boring passages),  
remains paradoxically original and interesting, as well as the  
writings of Greg Betts (If Language), Jordan Scott (Blert) and his  
close friend Darren Wershler-Henry (Apostrohe (with Bill Kennedy)).  
He passionately evoked R. Murray Schafer’s experimental opera The  
Princess of the Stars, and the gothic atmosphere that surrounded its  
third ever staging in August of 2007, a performance in which Bök  
played the Three-Horned Enemy. And, along the way, he generously drew  
relationships between modern Canadian letters and American literature  
writ large.

Reflecting on how we might understands Bök’s revival of the ephemeral  
sound poems of Kurt Schwitters and Hugo Ball (two elements of the  
reading he gave at the Beinecke (soon to be streaming@ http:// 
beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/ ), we considered how avant-garde  
experimentation appeals to transnational audiences more easily than  
works more steadily inscribed in a national, modernist aesthetics. In  
response to how he viewed his (dis)connection to the Oulipo (the  
contemporary French experimental group known for its exploitation of  
formal constraints), Bök doubted he could be a part of a group in  
which he did not have a founding stake. And, in addition to citing  
temperamental differences, Bök explained some frustration with that  
group’s conservative poetics. Decrying the apolitical character of  
the group, Bök regretted that with so much talent and potential that  
group of writers and mathematicians would preoccupy themselves  
tweaking normative poetic forms such as the sonnet or the sestina,  
instead making bold attempts at creating new forms detached from what  
remnant nostalgia tradition instills.

Though our conversation remained entirely improvised, group member  
were impressed by how pat the emission of Bök’s responses. If little  
seemed to surprise him—clearly a consummate professional whose  
mastery of his voice and persona astounds—some of us were left with  
an eerie feeling that perhaps parts of Christian had already become  
robotic, monstrously mechanical in the wicked quick deduction and  
analyses of multiple consubstantial possible solutions to each real  
or imagined query.

Looking forward to seeing many of you at the reading this Thursday at  
the Beinecke.

Cordially,

—Jean-Jacques Poucel, Occasional scrivner




Graham Foust is the author of three books of poetry, Necessary  
Stranger, Leave the Room to Itself, and As in Every Deafness and  
numerous poetry chapbooks. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and  
raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He is currently the Director of the  
Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at St. Mary’s College  
of California.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of numerous books of poetry,  
including Pure Descent, winner of the National Poetry Series,  
Apprehend, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series, Under that Silky  
Roof, House Made of Silver, and Bed of Lists. She has been awarded  
the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the  
Fund for Poetry. She is co-editor of 26, a magazine of poetry and  
poetics, EtherDome, a press dedicated to publishing the work of  
emerging women poets, and Instance Press.

For more information about and examples of Graham Foust’s and  
Elizabeth Robinson’s work visit:

Graham Foust
http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/foustg_poems1.htm
http://www.typomag.com/issue02/000026.html
http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2004/12/graham-foust-wrote-two- 
books-of-poems.html

Elizabeth Robinson
http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/elizabeth_robinson02.shtml
http://brooklynrail.org/2007/9/poetry/three-poems-by-elizabeth-robinson
http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/04/elizabeth-robinson-is- 
author-of-6.html

  
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