"Innovative writing" 1

The Writhing Society, which practices a number of constrained-writing techniques — oulipian, para-oulipian, extra-oulipian, zoomorphic, biblioerotic, and propriofugal — feels itself to be in solidarity with the "innovative writing" community and more broadly with new ways of practicing and thinking about the arts. Accordingly Wendy Walker and I traveled to Buffalo earlier this month to show the Writhing Society flag (blank as yet, may feature porcupines rampant) at the AndNow 2009 conference. We stayed for five nights at the glacial, poorly housekept Hyatt Regency in downtown Buffalo, gave and attended panels and workshops, sold some Proteotypes books and some by our friends James Walsh of Observatory, Herbert Pfostl of Observatory and Blind Pony books, and Alicita Rodriguez and Joe Starr of MARGINALIA magazine. Many delightful encounters with our fellow innovators and long conversations with Rebecca Goodman and Martin Nakell. A few memorable readings, some memorably good (Danielle Alexander, Pedro Ponce, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve Katz), and some others that left us wondering what was innovative about them, they seemed so like mainstream fiction with perhaps a shade more violent sex and a choppier distribution of structural bits and points of view.

So I have started to think about "innovation" in writing, and I'm not going to be able to fit all those thoughts into one post. But to give a partial preview, I want to see whether innovation is adequately defined by its notional contrary, either "mainstream" writing or "traditional writing." I want to ask some questions about what seems to be the growing assumption that innovative writing needs to be "performative" (thereby engaging the resources of many other media besides the printed page) and not "absorptive," like the transaction between the reader and the book.

Right now I'm still thinking about the venues for the AndNow conferences: at Notre Dame University, famed for Jesuits and football; at Lake Forest, a selective college in a wealthy suburb of Chicago; at Chapman University, founded as a Christian college in the county seat of Orange County, CA; and Buffalo, under the auspices but not on the premises of SUNY Buffalo.

Maybe this last setting seems most appropriate. Buffalo is a town struggling with post-industrial depression but with a strong tradition of supporting the arts (three F. L. Wright houses, the fine Albright-Knox museum, the ugly new Burchfield-Penney museum which will be a real destination when they get around to showing some of their vast holdings of Charles Burchfield's paintings). And SUNY Buffalo itself has a strong tradition of promoting innovative writing, especially poetry in the Olson-Creeley-Bernstein tradition. But it's still possible to say that the conference has been held in all these places because someone in an English department (Steve Tomasula, Davis Schneiderman, Martin Nakell, Christina Milletti and Dimitri Anastasopoulos) has had the courage and the clout to bring it to their school. Conversations with some AndNow organizers brought out the fact that blood was shed in the struggle (almost literally in one case) to get the conference to these places.

But none of these places is a natural or even a comfortable home to innovation. Maybe the avant-garde thrives on discomfort and alienation, but it also, since misery loves company, thrives where there is a community of fellow-practitioners across the spectrum of the arts. Downtown Manhattan and parts of western Brooklyn; Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, or the Bay Area come to mind, and many of the participants at AndNow have come from these places. Of course there's nothing wrong with getting out of the neighborhood and seeing a bit of the world. But when the bit of the world consists of hotel conference rooms or university classrooms (which differ really only in the carpeting, particularly hectic at the Buffalo Hyatt), then I start to ask why AndNow has to happen under the auspices of a university. And the still more important question: what is the proper role of universities and the academic world in housing the arts, especially the more vulnerable, fledgling, experimental or innovative arts? Don't those arts have something to lose from the academic connection?

To be continued.

Homomorphic Converters and Blue Fire

Homomorphic Converters, the second pamphlet in the series 13 Writhing Machines, has just come out from Proteotypes in Brooklyn. 13 Writhing Machines is a series of instruction manuals in the various techniques of constrained composition. (The first pamphlet, Administrative Assemblages, is being reprinted and will be available in about a week.)

Homomorphic Converters takes a look at a variety of procedures that fill a pre-existent form with new content. For example, in "homoconsonantism" you take a sentence (the one you're reading, for instance) and reuse the consonants in the same order but with different vowels.

So: f/r/x/m/p/l/n/h/m/k/n/s/n/n/t/s/m etc. To practice "allosyntaxism" (also known as "homolexicalism" you reuse all the words from the original in a different order. There's a section on "homoikonism" about putting prexistent images to different use. For example Arcimboldo painted a bowl of vegetables that becomes a man's face when you turn it upside down. All the forms of the man's features are vegetables.

Proteotypes is also publishing Wendy Walker's Blue Fire, which also will be available in the next couple of days. Blue Fire is the first full-length poetic nonfiction produced by the application of constraints. It is the record of Wendy's fascination with the case of Constance Kent, a famous murder case in 1860s Britain. As a fifteen-year-old girl Constance was accused of murdering her four-year-old half-brother. Four years later, under the influence of a priest, she confessed to the crime, although all the evidence pointed to a manslaughter committed by her father and the boy's nursemaid. Having tried to make a novel of this material, Wendy came to see the fictional use of it as unethical. "After all, Constance had already fictionalized it." Instead she created a two-directional text, one part a poetic text derived from the first account of the crime by using one word from every line of that book and thereby extracting and exposing the patriarchal discourse of its author, Joseph Stapleton. Having composed those words into blocks of text, she then went to books that Constance is known to have read, and to books about the case, and to books published in the 1860s, and extracted from them passages of as many lines as there were words in a block of her derived text. The result gives a picture not just of the case but of the whole mentality within which it unfolded.

Order these books on Amazon or through the Proteus Gowanus webstore at www.proteusgowanus.com.

Lipophonemism, Lipotaxism

In "Voyelles" Rimbaud assigned colors to vowels:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu…

and goes on to amplify:

A, noir corset velu de mouches éclatantes

Que bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

Golfes d'ombres.

In the late Paul Schmidt's translation (Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, trans. P. Schmidt; New York: Harper & Row, 1976):

A, black belt, hairy with bursting flies,

Bumbling and buzzing over stinking cruelties,

Pits of night.

The interesting thing to me is how much the affect of Schmidt's translation actually depends on the vowels u, especially in the short bu- phone, and i. Bu- evokes flies, I guess, but more broadly there is something abrupt about u and i. (Not you and I; we're all right). Those were the two vowels I was left with last Wednesday when The Writhing Society worked with the lipogrammatic procedure called La belle absente. That's the one where you compose a text using all the letters not in a name, in this case our own. (The opposite, le beau présent, uses all the letters in a name, and only those. I wrote a beau-présent poem when my son was married last June.) My name, Tom La Farge, took out the three other vowels. What I wrote felt to me more brittle and more vulgar than what I would normally write.

Christian Bök's chapter of u's in his monovocalic Eunoia (mentioned in the last post) makes you feel what an aggressive vowel u is, especially when followed by hard consonants (-ck, -nt). Here again it's not the vowel alone that carries the affect as the phoneme. Besides the obvious vulgarities, other u+hard consonant combinations produce the same effect:

Duluth dump trucks lurch, pull, U-turns. Such trucks dump much undug turf: clunk, clunk—thud. (78)

Poets used to write more about the affect intrinsic to sounds, and others have pointed out the absurdity in trying to create an affect-lexicon of sounds. Tennyson's line "the murmur of innumerable bees" stood as an example of euphonious sound-combinations expressing the lulling noise of the hive until John Crowe Ransom pointed out that you get nearly the same effect with "the murder of innumerable beeves." The feeling, in other words, was being projected on the basis of the content, not the sound. But I don't agree with Ransom. I think the line he found, about the slaughter of hecatombs of steers, is euphonious, and does rather appallingly convey a lulling, undifferentiated hive-noise, with the possible exception of the intrusive hard d. In other words the affect-content of the sounds and the meaning-content of the words are set at odds.

There's much more to say about this: about the affect we share with animals, about bird-song. Not tonight.

The other procedure we practiced last Wednesday was one of the most interesting oulipian ones, invented by the co-founder François Le Lionnais, and as far as I know rarely imitated. This is what Le Lionnais calls "la rien que la toute la," which Oulipo Compendium translates as "the only the wholly the." It could be called lipotaxis: what is left out is parts of speech, specifically nouns, verbs, and adjectives. That leaves adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns, including the indefinite pronouns. Clearly it helps to remember your grammar-school grammar here. Just after first reading about this procedure I was walking in Prospect Park with Wendy. It had rained recently; a large puddle covered one section of the path, and from beyond it a three-year-old boy was bearing down upon the water with every appearance of appetite. His mother, some distance in the rear, then called out: "Not through it, around it!" A perfect example of la rien que la toute la.

Jacqueline Cantwell, who works in the courts in Brooklyn, came to class with an event on her mind, witnessed that day. Here's how she describes it:

I was going into the courthouse and saw an old woman in line for the machines that check for weapons. As soon as I saw her, I knew she was ill. She was an old woman carrying over-stuffed bags. She had hospital bracelets on her wrists. The real give away was her white bra worn over her pink sweater; no woman does that.

I walked past her. A young woman, an attorney, was laughing at this woman and her fellow attorneys joined in.

I went into the library and ten minutes later, the same old woman comes into the library and announces she can't breathe. She starts ranting something while we get her in a chair. I called security and said I needed help with the old woman, "What's wrong with her is she's crazy." The court officers came and walked her out the building. She needed help; 911 should have been called. I thought court security was going to call 911 for her.

I was so upset because our duty is to hold off the street--and that means street attitudes and behavior. We are not supposed to laugh at the ill and throw them neglected on the street.

Here is what Jacqueline wrote:

For her to likely

Over her to likely

Above her to likely

Next for her

Next over her

Next above her

Because she surely next over

Because they surely next over her

Because next over them surely she

But for those hither

Wherever she hither for

Wherever she hither over

Wherever she hither above

Wherever next for her

Wherever over her

Wherever she surely not over

Wherever they surely not over her

Wherever next over them surely she

But for those hither

We all agreed that this piece accurately reproduces a fragmentary, repetitive, disoriented, yet still dignified state of mind.

Lipograms

Last Wednesday the Writhing Society tackled lipograms, the constraint where some letter or letters is made unavailable for use. Losing a vowel constrains you considerably, especially if that vowel is e, a, or o, the most common in English usage. Of course monovocalism, limiting yourself to a single vowel, is even harder. Georges Perec, who wrote La Disparition (Paris: Denoël, 1969; trans. G. Adair as A Void, London: Harvill, 1993) without using the letter e (even harder in French than in English, yet one critic never noticed!), also wrote Les Revenentes (Paris: Julliard, 1972; trans. I. Monk as The Exeter Text in Three By Perec, London: Harvill, 1996) using only that vowel. Christian Bök wrote a book in five sections, Eunoia (Toronto: Coach House, 2001), in each restricting himself to a single vowel, even in the dedications to Hans Arp (aka Jean Arp, the dadaist), the surrealist René Crevel, Dick Higgins of Fluxus, Yoko Ono (also a Fluxus member), and Zhu Yu, the Chinese performance artist (or the Song dynasty poet).

In a postscript essay, "The New Ennui," Bök writes:

Eunoia abides by many subsidiary rules. All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau, and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few words do go unused, despite effortes in incude them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord, and tumulus. The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, n word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed. (pp 103-4)

There are a couple of interesting points here. One might suppose that adopting multiple constraints limiting both word-forms and content would put the writer entirely at the mercy of the constraint and make it impossible to carry out a compositional intention. Yet Oulipo insists that "the only literature is voluntary literature" and insists that the use of constraints makes the writer freer than does so-called "free writing," where the writer will inevitably obey unconscious constraints. [I will be very happy indeed when English solves its problem of gender-pronoun reference.] And this is true. Paradoxically, in complex works such as Eunoia or Perec's La vie mode d'emploi (Paris: Hachette, 1978; trans. D. Bellos as Life A User's Manual, Boston: Godine: 1987), where multiple constraints are scrupulously adhered to, the result is not merely distinctive in some quaint, tour de force sort of way, but really original, offering a real reading experience. Because the writer has willed a collaboration with certain realities — about language, but also about the world — he and/or she creates a text that distinguishes itself by originality, but also by its openness to collaboration by the active reader. In other words, there are two different voluntarisms at work here, the writer's and the reader's.

Bök refers to Rimbaud's famous sonnet about vowels, "Les voyelles," and creates a homophonic translation of it in "Voile." I'd like to come back next time to the idea that letters (or better, phones) have real affective content, at least in combination with one another, so that suppressing them makes a difference to the affect of the writing. To be continued!