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{ Tuesday, February 25, 2003 }





Christian Bök & Eunoia



In preparation for an interview with Christian Bök on Monday, I've been listening to these amazing sound works that he made. Bök won the Griffin this year, one of the biggest prizes in poetry ($40k!) for his book Eunoia -- an Oulipian exercise with an incredible number of constraints: each of the five chapters used only one vowel, AEIO & U in that order. 'Eunoia' means "beautiful thinking" and is the shortest word in the 
English language that contains all five vowels.  In the end notes 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 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...The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.



Sadly, he was unable to find places for parallax, belvedere, gingivitis*, monochord and tumulus. 


Among many other achievements in sound poetry and conceptual artwork (building books out of Rubik's cubes and Legos), Bök has created artificial languages for two TV shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon. 


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 


* Whenever I see the word "gingivitis" I think of the time Barry White was a guest on David Letterman and Dave did his usual Top Ten countdown, which was "The Top Ten Unsexy Words that Barry White Can Make Sound Sexy" --Barry White read them -- and #1 was "gingivitis".















	LINK 	|  7:43 PM | TB 





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{ COMMENTS }




for the curious, the entire text of Eunoia is available online.

pinder | February 26, 2003  9:46 AM



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And remember to Tip the Author if you read it and enjoy it!

Caterina Fake | February 26, 2003 11:16 AM



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Amazing post - thank you!  I particularly enjoyed listening to "And Sometimes" - "exhaustively cites all of the English words that do not contain any of the five vowels (A, E, I, O, U)."  Amazing!



I'm curious, why are you interviewing him? 



Emily | February 26, 2003 11:18 AM



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Wow -- you should ask Christian Bok about being compared to Hitler on the League of Canadian Poets Listserve...

Susan MacRae | February 26, 2003 12:43 PM



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Wow, Susan, is there an online archive? And why were they calling him that? Hitler killed millions of Jews. Bök wrote a couple books of poetry...? 



I suspect this is inflammatory name-calling that says more about the name-caller (and, unfortunately, the quality of online poetic "discourse") than about Bök. Now, if it were someone like, say, George Bowering who was calling him Hitler, wow, but I expect not. Do you have a reference?

Caterina | February 26, 2003  1:04 PM



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Oy! That was the most curious read I have had in a while...



Reading a long passage with only one vowel in it, is a little like imagining myself in Flatland. When the next vowel comes along, it is as if a different dimension came into view.



You have such wondrous diversity in your posts: from tea to mono-vowels in short jumps! I look forward to my daily dip in your site.

Felicity | February 26, 2003 11:15 PM



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gingivitis was totally number four or five. oprah was number one.

Steven | February 27, 2003  7:13 AM



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They were calling Bok Hitler because his poetry didn't apparently 'mean' anything -- ie to take the meaning out of the text is as fascist and dictatorial as removing the humanity of the Jews.  Apparently.  Personally I don't necessarily see the leap in logic in that one. Besides, I think there is quite a bit of meaning in the text (although I haven't read it completely to be honest), but because it is dense and not in your face literal, a lot of people are not willing to read it.  What can be more fascist of a reading than that, I think?



 Also, there were no

metaphors, narrative etc etc -- ie it wasn't a lyric poem and therefore it was written by a fascist.  Bok was also compared to Ezra Pound in his politics as well. (Although noone on the listserve actually consulted Bok about his politics....)



Yes, it does say more about the name-caller than the namee.  But

I always find that most literary criticism does.  That is why creative writing workshops can be HELL.



I don't have a reference no because I deleted all my e-mail messages.



Personally, I prefer lyric poetry but I'm not about to call anyone a fascist simply because they don't want to write lyrics.  But Bok is right -- there is a lot of really bad Canadian lyric poetry.  But then, there is also a lot of really bad not-lyric poetry too.  Although George Bowering is a pain in the butt, I have to agree with his observation that 95 percent of writing is mostly crap.  But the 5 percent is what everyone is trying for I suppose.



Susan MacRae | February 27, 2003  9:51 AM



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oops -- i accidentally put two comments on this comments page.  I was trying to rewrite another one and then i started thinking about something else.  Then it wouldn't let me post because i took too long.



well, I hope you get what I meant.

Susan MacRae | February 27, 2003 10:06 AM



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I fixed it, no problem.



'Meaning' is a skittish thing, especially in poetry and especially as it feints and dodges in Bök's books. But that's the point, right? Ludic not lyric. I've found Eunoia to be quite entertaining, laugh-out-loud funny, and a marvel of linguistic acrobatics. That so much meaning -- and humanity! -- could find its way into such clenched parameters is one of the most magical things about it. 



Caterina | February 27, 2003 11:52 AM



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Are you going to publish this interview with Christian Bok somewhere?

Susan MacRae | February 27, 2003 12:02 PM



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Yes, in the summer issue of Numb, a print magazine out of Toronto. 

Caterina | February 27, 2003 12:36 PM



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Oulipo



Not being too shallow here I hope. I was looking for your post of the word Oulipo. Do you have a clue what I'm talking about? Jim's site listed you as one who had posted it and we did too.  



Linking and winking, 

meg

meg | February 27, 2003  9:21 PM



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"Troll in the corner," says Natalya as he reads "Motorized Razors" et seq.

Toph | February 28, 2003  7:23 PM



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Sadly, it's true. All my archives have been taken offline so I don't have to spend hours clearing out comment spam with horrifying subject matter. I'm sorry.







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