Guagua and Punkwatrain results

We’ve suggested three constraints in recent posts, La Guagua, the Punkwatrain, and the Myriorama; now we’d like to share some of the results we’ve received for the first two. The Myriorama has four sections to it now, and we’ll hope for a few more before we post that too.

This post’s featured writher is, as so often before, Erik Schurink FWS. His Guagua features the boroughs of New York. (A Guagua, you will remember, is a text in which the last sound of a word is repeated as the first sound of the next word: La Antigua Guatemala was the prototype. Short phrases invariably spoken as a unit, such as Staten Island or "tunnel vision," count as one word.)

New York orchestra

Manhattan tunnel-vision shuns unseen scenery

reaping ingrown ownership

Staten Island endolithic Icarus

usurping kingdom dominant anteroom

The Bronx unction, unsettling lingo gospel

pulses Española, La Habana, Nanjing Yankees

Queensborough’s Rosetta Stone astounds

Brooklyn lineages gestate States-wide ideologues

blogging ingeniously liberal role-models Dullsville vilifies

One was holding one’s breath to see how Erik would handle “The Bronx,” and I think you’ll agree that his solution is brilliant. “Bronx unction” has to be extreme.

The Punkwatrain, adapted from Robert Rapilly’s invention (in French), “le katrainbour,” is a quatrain that expands a single line which is a homophonic version (pun) of a name. I proposed “Gowanus Canal” as the name; so then the first stage of composition involves creating a line that sounds quite like “Gowanus Canal,” the second to create a quatrain that leads up to that line and that refers in some way to the Gowanus Canal. This was Erik’s first shot:

Punxsutawney Phil

Emptied himself from his hole

And said upon smelling Brooklyn’s spill

“Go one ass, come all”

Punxsutawney Phil is the groundhog whose response to his own shadow, on Groundhog Day, determines the duration of winter. Punxsutawney, besides being the name of a place in Pennsylvania where this observation takes place [I think], puns pleasantly on the first half of punkwatrain. Those not living near the Gowanus Canal may need to be reminded that it usually is emitting distinctively disagreeable smells.

In this next punkwatrain Erik adds on a second constraint by limiting himself to words from a poem by Galway Kinnell:

Remember the bud, the hand, the earthen snout, the fodder

and slops, and spine, and the spiritual curl of the tail

of the sow; and the saint, Maud and Fergus, and their mother—

wife of the long, perfect loveliness Galway S. Kinnell.

I’m ashamed to say that when I first read this, I didn’t see that “Galway S. Kinnell” is homophonic with Gowanus Canal. (The poet does not have or use that middle initial.) I loved the poem, more interesting, to my taste, than most of Kinnell’s own. But the quatrain did not allude to the Gowanus Canal. I wrote Erik about this, and he carried out this second version:

the long, perfect loveliness of Gowanus Canal

when your sewer smells like hogs in hell

think of it as the Sow, blessed by a Saint,

mirror it as thy Self, rich with constraint,

advises poet Galway S. Kinnell

Yes, that is about what Kinnell would say about the Gowanus, I think.

Finally I received from Robert Rapilly himself, a katrainbour in French:

Pour nettoyer son canoë

sous un déluge de nitrates,

le plus sûr conseil qu'a Noé

vient du livre aux Ours Écarlates.

Tome lave Arche

“To wash down your canoe,/ beneath a downpour of nitrates,/ the best advice that Noah has/ comes from the book The Crimson Bears.

“Tome washes Ark.”

The Crimson Bears was the first book I wrote, and "tome lave Arche" is my own name pronounced with French inflections (maybe a little Yiddish also). Highly gratifying; I feel as if I have been inducted into the Legion of On Oar, the galley-slaves of constrained writing. I wrote back with the following punkwatrain on "Robert Rapilly" (Rapilly runs a website called Zazie mode d’emploi, and he constributes regularly to a publication called Archimède, as well as to Drunken Boat, to which I did not allude.) To make things even more like galley-slaving, each line is an anagram of the others. That made rhyming impossible, of course.

Zazie can fish her jokes from any modern river,

jook¹-dance hazy if-mazes, never in mirror — fresh —

jazz Archimedes’ kin free from sorry nano-hive,

share fizzy Norman²-French over-jokes I admire.

“Robe air rapidly”

1. “Jook” (var. “juke”), de “jook joint,” avec la suggestion d’une forme de danse libre dans une espace contrainte. [“Jook joints” were small dance halls for African American laborers. Thus “jook” is being used to suggest free dance in a constrained space.]

2. Hommage à Queneau (et Breton) [both from Normandy].

Next post we'll get the Myriorama rolling, so please sit down and write one and send it in. The guidelines are in the last post before this one.

Myriorama

The "myriorama," or tableau polyoptique, invented by Jean-Pierre Brès in Napoleonic France, is a variable landscape, a panorama whose elements can be interchanged to create an enormous number of different scenes. Often printed on cards, a myriorama consisting of 18 cards (and there are sets with as many as 26) will yield 18 to the 18th different combinations, many more than Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (a hundred thousand billion poems = 10 to the 14th combinations). This set of cards, "The Endless Landscape," a Christmas present from Wendy Walker, has 24 cards, which the publishers (Tobar Ltd. in the UK) reckon can be assembled in 1,686,553, 615, 927, 922, 354, 187, 720 ways.

Notice how several different horizons have been matched so that they will join whenever any two cards are placed side by side: the haze, the hills, the islands, the near bank, the road, the grass this side of the road. At first glance it may not seem as if changing the order of the cards will make any dramatic difference to the landscape as a whole. But if you wanted to make a narrative that read from left to right (or right to left), then the different elements in the cards — the obelisk, the balloon, the kite-flyers, the island with the gaping cave , the groups walking or riding in one direction or the other — suggest encounters, conversations, adventures that could all be changed by a reshuffling of the cards, which were created as a game for children.

But the images could be more emblematic and their sequence less rationalized.

Hiroshige, an electron microscope image of slimemolds, Francis Bacon, Jacques Callot, and Lyonel Feininger all contributed to this one, with one non-reassemblable horizon line.. A "pure" myriorama might never proceed to the stage of creating a text, narrative or otherwise. It would be fun to create images such that they match up when laid alongside. Besides landscapes it should be possible to make a composite portrait that way. Another famous 19th century game consisted of a book whose pages, each figuring a cartoonish character, were sliced across at the neck and the waist, so that the individual thirds of the pages could be turned separately. In that way the heads, upper bodies, and lower bodies can be recombined. I have never seen such a book with pages cut vertically, but it could be done.

A myriorama could be constructed of text alone. There would have to be a verbal "horizon," an element to link each section of text. This might consist of a phrase with which each segment would end: "… with the consequence that" would yield a very plotted story. Or it could return to the same time and/or place and relaunch from there. Or to an image. One can imagine musical myrioramas where the "horizon" might be, again, a phrase played in the same key at the same pitch and tempo, by the same instruments, a motif exactly repeated. If Wagner had composed in this way, we could reassemble his operas in all the combinations they would afford us. Wagner was perhaps not the man to yield control to listeners, but another composer could.

And of course all of this can be done collaboratively. Once the horizon line is established, from which each segment must begin and to which it must return, different composers can create the segments, and then the group can share the whole "deck" to make whatever combination is preferred, individually or collectively.

I reach for the nearest book to create a challenge. The book is Christopher Hobhouse's Oxford. As It Was and As It Is Today (London: B. T. Batsford, 1939). I open it at random to page 64. Using the following sentence as an opening and a closing, compose two hundred words and send them to tomlafarge@gmail.com:

"On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible."

Or make up your own myriorama and send it to the same address.

[Erik Schurink FWS has recently posted a set of excellent images to Gretchen Henderson's collaborative blog, Galerie de Difformité. My own cut-up piece, "Vitellius' Violent Propensity, is a side-gallery in Exhibit O.]