- Homophony
Two-beer naughty beat shatters equation
And so it goes, the famous line being put through such other hoops as “Double
Curtailing” (“Not to be, that is”), “Antonymy” (“Nothing and something; this
was an answer”), and “Permutation” (“That is the question: to be or not
to be).”
What is the purpose of Mathews’s little Hamlet game? First, it demon-
strates the difference syntax and morphology can make, the changes that
meaning undergoes by means of something as seemingly trivial as the addi-
tion of a single phoneme or a change in word order. “That is the question:
to be or not to be” has an entirely different emotional aura from the original,
and amplication (#13) turns Hamlet’s meditation on suicide into a Woody
Allen comedy passage. More important: as in the case of Roubaud and Béna-
mou’s alexandrines, Mathews’s “35 Variations” is an anatomy of the untrans-
latability that makes poetry what it is. For, as the variations show, there is no
other way to say “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Consider the
rhy thm:
To be or not to be // that is the questionwhere the clash of stresses in the ¤fth and sixth syllables and the extra un-
stressed ¤nal syllable enact what the line is saying. The lipogram “to be or
not to be, that’s the problem” has the requisite ten syllables but loses the force
of the terrifying eleven-syllable original. For one thing, “Problem” cannot
compete with “Question” with its paragram on quest. For another, “that”
must be isolated for emphasis. Sound and syntax, in this scheme of things,
are all.
The Linear Fallacy
In the United States, Oulipo has long had its counterpart in the work of John
Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and the Fluxus poets. Cagean constraints are not as
literary as those of Oulipo—the rules are not likely to involve rhetorical ¤g-
ures like anagram or homophony—but the counting devices are often more
elaborate than such Oulipo rules as N + 7.^8 The poetry of constraint, in
any case, is now becoming an interesting alternative to the dominant poetic
mode of the anthologies and journals—dominant, incidentally, not just in
conservative but in so-called experimental circles as well. Consider the fol-
lowing examples, some of them lyric, others narrative, which I have selected
Procedural Poetics of Bök and Bergvall 211