Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

In 2002 the Spenser Society, which regularly sponsors a session or two at
the annual Modern Language Association convention, asked me to partici-
pate in a panel on the legacy of the Spenserian stanza. I am hardly a
Spenser expert, but when I studied the stanza, with its ingenious interlock-
ing rhyme scheme (ababcdcdd), in which eight iambic pentameter lines are
followed, to great effect, by a final alexandrine, it struck me that although
after the nineteenth-century poets no longer use the Spenserian stanza, its
complexity and especially its deployment of the alexandrine have much to
teach a poetry culture that is increasingly indifferent to the role of sound in
poetry. Indeed, the free verse, now dominant not only in the United States
but also around the world, has become, with notable exceptions, little more
than linear prose, arbitrarily divided into line lengths. But there are two sites
where sound is once again being foregrounded. The first, as we have already
seen, is in Concrete and post-Concrete visual poetries. The second may be
found in procedural (rule-governed) poetics, whose center today is probably
the French movement called Oulipo. The following essay takes up the Oulipo
alexandrine and some of its Anglophone derivates.

11

The Oulipo Factor

The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall

Loyal practitioners of the alexandrine, our hexameter, unhinge from

within the meter of this rigid and puerile mechanism. The ear, freed from

a factitious counting, takes joy in discerning, on its own, all the possible

combinations of twelve tones.

Stephane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers”

Our words must seem to be inevitable.

W. B. Ye a t s , Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley

In 1988 Jacques Roubaud, the remarkable poet-novelist-theorist-mathematician,
published a book called La vieillesse d’Alexandre (The Old Age of Alexander),
which makes the case that the death of the alexandrine—the twelve-syllable