Last October Rapilly offered a passage by another oulipian, Paul Fournel, the current president, who spoke — largely to deaf ears — at the nOulipo conference organized by Christine Wertheimer and Mattias Viegener in Los Angeles in 2005. The passage presented a case for the proposition: "Le vélo est l'école du vent" ("The bicycle is a wind-school.") Responders were to transform that passage using any constraint they liked. If reasonably francophone, you can see the passage at http://blackbanzai.free.fr/, where you will also find, under “contraintes,” a number of other good writing ideas.
More recently Rapilly has proposed a constraint he calls the “katrainbour,” a cross between quatrain, the verse form, and calembour, the French word for pun. I’ve therefore called it, till someone comes up with a better name, “punkwatrain,” and I would like to launch this English version with an hommage to the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary collaborative gallery and reading room that houses the Writhing Society and in every way our mother-ship, stands near the oozy marge of that notorious punk para-waterway, itself one of the great amalgams or conflations of substances left in post-industrial New York and a icon of pollution that should probably be preserved as a hideous warning. Proteus Gowanus has recently opened its “Hall of the Gowanus,” a permanent installation of art, artifacts, and books relating to the Gowanus (www.proteusgowanus.com).
The punkwatrain, as described by Rapilly (I am paraphrasing his instructions), works like this: you start with a name: Gowanus Canal (or “the [or da] Gowanus Canal”). You translate it into its (roughly) homophonic equivalent: “Go on askin’, Al.” This new phrase will now serve as the “moral” of a short fable or riddle in a verse quatrain, within which some oblique reference must be made to the original phrase, in this case Gowanus Canal. The rhyme scheme and meter of the quatrain is left up to you.
Gore takes the global view: “Go Green!”
Well, fine, but there’s a spot
Of brown in Brooklyn Al’s not seen.
A waterway it’s not.
"Go on askin’, Al."
(Gowanus Canal)
The names of Paris subway stations has proved, for the francophone responders, a popular source of katrainbours for Rapilly’s French responders. Most metro stations are named for people or battles, and many consist of short phrases or hyphenations, making them more apt for this constraint that most stations in New York. The quatrains for Réaumur-Sébastopol, for example, must allude both to the French savant’s invention of the thermometer-scale that bears his name or to his studies in entomology, and as well to the Crimean city, home of the tsarist Black Sea fleet, besieged by the French (and British and Turks) in the Crimean War.
When so applied, katrainbours represent an elaboration of a famous public-works project carried out by Oulipo, the “Strasbourg tramway” (or “Troll de Tram,” a phrase that inflects the French phrase drôle de tram [odd tram] towards its German pronunciation, since Strasbourg is the capital of Alsace and has a large German-speaking population). While building a new system of tramways, Strasbourg commissioned a set of texts from the Oulipo, one for each of 32 stops coming and going on the A line, Hautepierre - Illkirch. This challenge was met in several different ways; the homophonic one involved taking the phrase le tramway de Strasbourg and translating it homophonically 32 times to produce 32 other phrases, each of which was then “explained” in a brief text. Texts and homophonic phrases were inscribed at the top of the column marking the spot and presumably are still to be read there today. The following phrases are some samples; the entire set may be read on:
http://membres.lycos.fr/dmasson/tramway-strasbourg/:
Les trois nuées aident ce Thrace gourd.
L'ogre a mué: deux grasses courges.
Le crin mouillé décrasse bourbe.
Les trames nouées de ces phrases: bourde.
Laide rame, où est Destin, se gourre.
Les drachmes loués terrassent Boers.
Loth rame. Ouais! Doxa se gourre.
All quite roughly homophonic with “le tramway de Strasbourg.” Here’s the full text of the homophonic inscription at the Etoile stop (going towards the Illkirch terminal), preceded by its explanation:
L'été dernier, sur l'Ill, avant de couler par le fond, une barque, occupée par un couple d'individus agités, avançait d'une façon aussi spectaculaire qu'anarchique.
Les deux ramaient dextre à rebours.
“Last summer on the river Ill, before it sank to the bottom, a rowboat occupied by a pair of agitated characters made its way in a manner no less striking than anarchic.
“The two rowed with their right hands moving in reverse.”
Some of the other stories that commuters in Strasbourg have been given to puzzle over involve Lot’s escape from Sodom by boat, contrary to received tradition; the scandal created in St. Petersburg by the fat calves of the Bulgarian tsar Dimitri XIV; the severely pursed lips of the guard at the entrance of the Villa d’Este in Rome; the shoals of sprats dancing in the harbor at the launching of an ocean liner. Some products of other constraints are described by David Fisher in English at http://www.terramedia.co.uk/fisherscircle/ask_me/oulipo_in_strasbourg.htm.
It would be possible to create a sort of linked tanka-like form of punkwatrains by finding or creating a series of names or short phrases, and then working Rapillian magic on each of them in sequence to create, perhaps, a narrative in quatrains, or a verse-and-response. If passed around, each new punkwatrain could be required to refer to and comment on the last.
If anyone wants to give this constraint a try and likes the results, please let us know the results. Send them to tomlafarge@gmail.com for potential posting.
