First Line Indications

A few months ago I was sent a pamphlet, Indices, by Daniel Levin Becker. Levin Becker is the youngest (though not the newest) member of Oulipo. He was elected after a Fulbright year spent organizing and indexing that group’s archives, and Indices became at the moment of its publication the latest item in that archive. It is No. 180 of La Bibliothèque Oulipienne, the library of similar pamphlets disseminated mainly within the group and recording new constraints, or new results from old ones, or thinking about particular constraints, which members present at the monthly meetings. This library is still next thing to unavailable, though several volumes of collected pamphlets are in print in French from Le Castor Astral and can be ordered here. Atlas in the UK, publisher of Oulipo Compendium, had plans to bring them out in English, but those plans seem to have lapsed. All the pamphlets are listed on the Oulipo website, but when clicked on and opened they yield only the opening sentence or two, if that. One hopes that will change soon. In the meanwhile Indices was, for me, a fascinating rarity.

Indices means “indexes” and “indications.” Levin Becker’s pamphlet considers book-indexes, specifically the table of contents and the first-line index for a book of poems. Poems are very specific indications of meaning, the most fully intentional kind of writing, while the index of a book is a text not intended to be read in the same way as the text it indexes; not intended to be read at all. It is “apparatus” — a tool like the notes, the bibliography, the table of contents, the running titles, and in some scholarly works those pages that explain what various abbreviations and acronyms stand for: manuscript collections or journals or reference works. Like those other tools, the index is consulted at need. But it is printed on pages like other text and bound into the same codex as other text; it could be read. Levin Becker, like J. G. Ballard before him (see his “The Index” in War Fever), considers the ways of reading by which indexes can be made fully suggestive, if not indicative. By “ways of reading” I am of course saying “constraints for writing.”

Following the title page one opens to a “Table des matières,” or table of contents. The first five items:

5. Lenteur de l’araignée [the slowness of the spider]

6. Préhistoire de l’amour [the prehistory of love]

7. Acharnements [instances of single-minded energy]

8. Soucis inédits [unpublished anxieties]

10. Bribes du sondage isoloir [fragments from isolation-booth soundings]

These are the titles of poems, and there are 64 of them. (My copy is No. 064, and it was mailed to me at Calle del Espiritu Santo 64.) But here another question rises, since this saddle-stitched pamphlet is only 28 pages long — seven sheets printed on both sides, two pages to a side. And it might be at this moment that you remember where the table of contents normally comes in a French book — after the matter it indexes — and notice that the page numbers run from 89 to 108. Where are the poems?

The table des matières is immediately followed by a second index, “Index des premiers vers” or index of first lines (vers meaning line and not verse in French). Such an index would come at the end of an English book of poems, such as the excellent anthology Lovers, Rakes, and Rogues. A new garner of love-songs and merry verses, 1580-1830, ed. John Wardroper (London: Shelfmark, 1997), to which we shall return in due course.

Following that index Levin Becker, on “p. 95,” raises the possibility that the poems named in the table of contents and first-line different exercise may not be found in this book, may have gone astray in the layout process, may even never have troubled to get themselves written. I should add that these are not found titles and first lines but were composed for the occasion by Levin Becker himself; nonce-titles and nonce-incipits.

And it’s interesting to pause here and think about the sort of poetry collections with first-line indexes. That piece of apparatus implies a use of poems that is no longer universal, namely memorizing them. If you’re going to look up a poem that begins with a certain line, you must already know that line. That implies study, or at least more than one reading, which in turn implies that the poem came to you with a certain charge of value on it, a compelling demand for attention to which you acceded. With much contemporary poetry, in English anyway, poetry is consumed as a performance primarily, a text secondarily. I looked in Eliot Weinberger’s Innovators and Outsiders. American Poetry Since 1950 (NY: Marsilio: 1993). No first-line index. Gross and Quasha’s Open Poetry (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1973) doesn’t have one either. When I went to try out Levin Becker’s suggested reading methods, I did not find a collection with a first-line index later than Wallace Stevens’ The Palm At the End Of the Mind (NY: Vintage, 1967). Wallace Stevens is literature; I don’t understand why Louis Zukofsky is not, in the eyes of publishers, but so it is. The French are less shy about placing their work in a literary context, and of course littérature is the li in Oulipo.

Back to Indices, this collection that is nothing but a table of contents and a first-line index. “Que faire?” asks Daniel Levin Becker. What do we do now? He proceeds to make several suggestions for how to use this gutted collection of poems. He begins with the first-line index, “something that can be read, potentially self-sufficient. Beneath its ostensible utilitarian servility it proposes a number of ways to read it” (my translation). He proposes four ways.

A. Ordinally. Read the "first lines" in the sequence of the pages on which they are listed. Here are the first lines for pages 10-12: "Vous a-t-on déjà dit/ La vous qui devint toi/ L'effet de votre toux" [Did anyone ever tell you,/ the You who became just you/ What the effect of your cough is."

B. In index-order. Moving through the index, which is of course alphabetical, select lines as you go that when sequenced in the order in which you found them make a poem.

C. By sound-value. Find lines that, regardless of length, rhyme. “Faute de lumière/ Tu fais le signet dans mon dictionnaire” [For lack of light/ You become the ribbon in my dictionary].

D. By length. Here Levin Becker profits from the regularity of French prosody, more syllabic than accentual. He is able to compose poems whose lines have six, eight, ten, or twelve syllables. Anglophone practitioners will either need to think about matching lengths and meters or about creating freer forms by mixing up a variety of lengths. What we get in each case is a constrained cento, limited only to opening lines.

After this Levin Becker moves on to the titles from the table of contents.

E. Since these can be read sequentially in the order in which they are listed, select pairs of titles or longer units that make a pleasing statement. I tried this with Wallace Stevens but the index of titles was alphabetized (see next). John Berryman’s Delusions, Etc. (NY: Farrar, Straus Girous, 1969) had an ordinal table of contents:

Your birthday in Wisconsin you are 140

Drugs alcohol little sister

In Memoriam (1914-1953)

F. Alphabetically. Stevens works here:

Anything is beautiful if you say it is

Another weeping woman

A pastoral nun

Or:

Arrival at the Waldorf

Banal sojourn

Chaos in motion and not in motion

Dance of the macabre mice

Esthétique du mal

G. By sound, using titles that rhyme. Still Stevens:

The pure good of theory:

World without peculiarity

This is harder with found poetry. You could try this with a variation that allows slant-rhyme or simply repeats a sound from one line to the next, then a second from that to a third, or pursues a single word through several titles.

The prejudice against the past

The plot against the giant

H. By length, as for D, and presenting the same problems. I have converted to lines roughly in iambic pentameter:

Disillusionment of ten o’clock —

So-and-so reclining on her couch

Less and less human, O savage Spirit!

The bird with the coppery, keen claws;

A rabbit as the king of ghosts.

I. “Ready-made elementary moralities.” The morale élémentaire was a form invented by Raymond Queneau. It uses a number of adjective-noun phrases in a particular arrangement, together with a section of freer lines. Levin Becker proposes drawing all of these from the titles. Some day I will give this form some sustained thought; at present I don’t completely get it.

J. Freestyle. Simply construct a poem by making an unconstrained selection from the titles, in short a cento.

K. Couplings. Join the titles with first lines, using any of the above methods.

It was very interesting applying some of Levin Becker’s proposals to Stevens. Hunting through these indexes in search of lines or titles that rhyme or have the same meter made me appreciate the skill, freedom, and originality with which Stevens puts words together. While his aesthetic and his ideas remain quite constant through his career, these act as center to the most particular and vivid speech-creatures describing the most gracefully wild trajectories through his gravitational field.

Before looking at what the Writhing Society made of the first-line index to Lovers, Rakes and Rogues, we should think about some other kinds of apparatus that might lead to poetic results when abstracted from the work they adumbrate. A concordance lists all the verses (of the Bible) or lines (of Shakespeare) in which a given word or phrase occurs. If one went to such a concordance with a word in mind, then one could apply some of the Indices constraints to the verses/lines/sentences in which that word occurs.

The Writhing Society worked with either Lovers, Rakes and Rogues (this scanned page)

or another anthology. Since we were working within a time constraint, we opted first for the Freestyle procedure with first lines and then, using the Length procedure, we constructed “snowballs” (each line one syllable longer than the preceding one) and “melting snowballs” (each line one syllable shorter than the preceding. We discussed but did not put into practice an application of Marcel Bénabou’s “perverses” (his variation of Harry Mathews’ “perverbs”). To do this, you would go to a first-line index and choose some lines that please you. Then divide them in the middle, perhaps at the cesura. Then recombine the beginnings and endings. We had a very good time and were all grateful to Daniel Levin Becker for inspiring us. Here are some results.

A Freestyle poem by me from Lovers, Rakes and Rogues:

What a’ devil ails our poets all?

Oh stop the mill, stop the mill, stop it I say!

Really wherever one passes

Through nations ranging, raking elements,

Though I sweep to and fro old iron to find,

Note of me was never took.

Oh mercury pills — those teasing pills.

Oh could I by any chimic art

To be a whore, despite of grace!

The landlord he looks very big —

Was ever mortal man like me?

Prithee die and set me free.

What is beauty but a breath?

Oh smother me to death!

A brief application of the sound constraint (C) at the end. Erik Schurink FWS used The Best Loved Poems of the American People. He changed the lineation in places.

A stranger came one night


to Yussouf’s tent. A cloud 


possessed the hollow field far out

beyond the city’s lights, 


away from the din and roar

I cannot say, and I will not say

When I have a house—as I sometime may

I cannot say, and I will not say; ‘Roof-tops, 


roof-tops, what do you cover?’

Drop the pebble in the water: 


Just a splash and it’s gone

Does the road wind up-hill 


all the way? I cannot say, 


and I will not say

I cannot say, and I will not say

When a feller hasn’t got a cent, what’s 


hallowed ground? Has earth a clod, have you


ever sat by the railroad track? Gone is

the city, gone is the day.

A builder builded a temple. I wander’d

lonely as a cloud. The sea is calm 
tonight.

My snowball from Lovers, Rakes and Rogues:

Thirsis to die desired

Walking in a meadow green.

She was so exquisite a whore,

Pillycock came to my lady’s toe.

What a thin, fine, cool, airy love at first!

The sun was just setting, the reaping was done;

The old wife she sent to the miller her daughter —

There was a buxom lass and she had a velvet ass.

Erik’s snowball + melting snowball from his anthology:

Give us Men!

A simple child

There was an old fox

No coward soul is mine

Two brown heads with tossing curls

Fifteen men on a Dead Man’s Chest

I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines

Is it true, O Christ in Heaven

O good painter, tell me true

Miss you, miss you, miss you

The woman I am

The parish priest

I love you

Kleiser-Cooperider Rhetorical Readymades

Last Wednesday the Writhing Society came out of hibernation and reconvened at Proteus Gowanus to take up a challenge posed by Carrie Cooperider FWS. She had found, in her collection of odd books, Grenville Kleiser’s 15,000 Useful Phrases, a self-help compendium from 1919. 15,000 Useful Phrases provides a set of readymade locutions, some as simple as an adjective-noun combination, some more elaborate, but all meant to be useful to a person lacking the Harvard vocabulary but interested in raising his or her station in life. Kleiser combed through the literature of the period to come up with — besides merely useful phrases — significant phrases, felicitous phrases, impressive phrases, prepositional phrases, business phrases, literary expressions, striking similes, public speaking phrases, and miscellaneous phrases.

Just this table of contents proposes a constraint, to extend the list in a sort of Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia entry (cf. “John Wilkins’ Analytic Language” in Other Inquisitions): phrases found on tombstones, phrases most often garbled by actors, phrases that sound like Finnish vulgarities, phrases popular with parrots, phrases with too many d’s in them, phrases that raise the dead, private speaking phrases, and so on.

You can download the entire text of Kleiser for nothing from: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18362. The page reproduced above gives you the flavor of his enterprise. The young Jay Gatz, on his way to becoming Gatsby, surely memorized a dozen of these every day. They bespeak that interesting moment in American history when working-class men and women who had been through the wars, either in Europe or in the battle for suffrage, who had been doing some reading and hearing some speakers, decided to challenge the oligarchy by appropriating their speech. (For a look into the same process among immigrants, in this case Jews, see Leo Rosten’s immortal The Education of Hyman Kaplan, in print from Prion Books.)

Carrie proposed a couple of ways in which Kleiser’s readymades might be used. The first, which we didn’t try but which we sense would be fruitful, was to take a published interview (and here I’d like to put in a plug for BOMB magazine, where artists interview other artists) and replace all the answers with phrases from Kleiser. The second requires the writer to fill in if… /then… constructions with phrases. Some results follow, after we note that other similar correlative constructions are equally attractive: neither… /nor…; not only… /but also…; on the one hand… /on the other hand…; there was a time when… / but now… ; shading into the oulipian Marcel Bénabou’s list of antitheses: “Maybe you [do or think or like something]; not me [followed by details].”

If/Then

If the adroit flatterer is the precursor of love, is the ambiguous grimace its apotheosis? (George Spencer)

If familiar sacredness, then air, woodland, water. (Jocelyn Hoshauer)

If each like a corpse within its grave then eyes like a very dark topaz. (Erik Schurink)

If exquisite tact, then a mind very like a bookcase. (Wendy Walker)

If enforced silence, then explosive violence. (Jonah Bloch-Johnson)

If lacerated feelings, then she permitted herself a delicate little smile. (Tom La Farge)

If pelted with an interminable torrent of words, then equitably governed. (Corina Bardoff)

A couple of further procedures were proposed by Jonah Bloch-Johnson, whom we knew in a former life and who here made his entry into the Writhing Society with great fanfare (he is a musician). Jonah began by identifying Kleiser’s phrases as consisting of clichés. Many of them are, certainly, though not many are current. Clichés, Jonah argued, point to some sort of concept in our minds or some sort of experience that many people have had. Flann O’Brien would agree: "A cliché is a phrase that has become fossilized, its component words deprived of their intrinsic light and meaning by incessant usage. Thus it appears that clichés reflect somewhat the frequency of the same situations in life. If this be so, a sociological commentary could be compiled from these items of mortified language." Writing as “Myles na gCopaleen” he compiled a catechism of cliché in his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times. A sample:

When things are few, what also are they?
 Far between.



What are stocks of fuel doing when they are low?
 Running.



How low are they running?
 Dangerously.

What does one do with a suggestion? 
One throws it out.



For what does one throw a suggestion out?
 For what it may be worth.



What else can be thrown out?
 A hint.



In addition to hurling a hint on such lateral trajectory, what other not unviolent action can be taken with it?
 It can be dropped.



What else is sometimes dropped?
 The subject.

For more like this, go to: http://grammar.about.com/b/2008/10/01/the-myles-na-gopaleen-catechism-of-cliche.htm

As a first step, then, at Jonah’s orders, we were to choose a phrase, or more than one, and then for each phrase chosen write two or three short descriptions of situations that the phrase could be used to indicate, the descriptions to be two or three sentences long “and include some detail.” He left it to us to decide whether the activating phrase should be mentioned or suppressed. Then as a second step one would compose a narrative connecting all the descriptions of all the phrases.

The first of these steps could be practiced collaboratively. Each participant in a group could choose a phrase and begin by writing a single short description of the situation evoked by that phrase, and then, concealing that description, pass the phrase along to the next person, who would repeat the process. At the end of a round each participant would have a collection of situation-descriptions by various hands, and then could proceed to write the narrative connecting them.

What we actually did was another minor variation. We each chose two phrases from Kleiser. We then passed those choices to the person on our right. (If we were doing this again, I’d pass one to the right and the other to the left.) We performed Jonah’s first step for each phrase individually, but only describing a single situation. Then we wrote a longer description of the situation suggested by both phrases taken together. I was handed limpid twilight and shadowy vistas of sylvan beauty (both poetic phrases, as you can see). Too easy in combination; there wasn’t much tension between them.

Corina Bardoff took the phrase excretory secretion in the following direction:

There is always a longer way to say a thing, and longer causes a listener to stop paying attention midway through a statement, so the air feels delicate around the two of you. A conversation should be like a silk negligee - soft and almost imperceptible - a negligee that will rip obscenely if anyone says "shit!"

From faces pale with bliss, like evening stars Erik Schurink derived:

At the museum of clocks with fluorescent numbers, there were no visitors but one, enough for the motion sensor to shut off the light, to dissolve the walls and ceiling into Dali’s hereafter.

Here is how Jocelyn Hoshauer combined fatalistic belief and affected, pedantic, and vain:

For living a sinful life, I was condemned to hell in a lecture hall. Knowing I couldn’t do anything about it anyway, I learned what “sin” meant in every religion, first in practice on earth, and then in theory, in hell.

And Wendy Walker’s merger of erudite labors with engulfing waters:

She dove into books looking for she knew not what, and they swallowed her completely. She read each sentence so closely, and pursued it so far, that in the end she couldn’t find her way home. On she journeyed, each volume dropping her through a trap-door into the next, with a what then or why or could this be true, and if so, according to whom? Where was the proof? Where the final word? Down she dropped through the rustling tunnel, down, down, into the nethermost circle of ink.

If you have ideas for other constraints using Kleiser’s phrases, please post them as a comment or send them to me at tomlafarge@gmail.com. Also if you composed some pleasing piece of writing using the constraints mentioned above.