Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

are no hard and fast divisions between their values. Be vigilant, this poetic
sequence tells us; don’t fall into the sorcerer’s trap. Don’t let the intricate mu-
sical structure and elaborate internal rhyming of the stanza sequence lull you
into apathy. In this sense Eunoia recalls such classic poems as Keats’s “Eve of
St. Agnes,” a poem that, like Eunoia, dramatizes the inextricability of pain
and pleasure—an inextricability carried through, of course, on the sound
and visual level as well. Eunoia may seem, on a ¤rst reading, like mere lan-
guage game, but it soon reveals itself to be a game where every thing is at
stake and where struggle is all. As the poet puts it in the I chapter, “Minds
grim with nihilism still ¤nd ¤rst light inspiring.”
If Eunoia is overtly an Oulipo work, following the chosen rule quite liter-
ally to the letter, other recent poetic texts have adapted the paradigm to their
own purposes. I am thinking of the performance texts of such British po-
ets as Chris Cheek, John Cayley, and especially Caroline Bergvall, who per-
forms frequently in the United States. Bergvall’s hybrid work—it is com-
posed for live and digital performance, installation, video, as well as book
form—derives from post-punk music and sound poetry as well as from lit-
erary movements like Oulipo. Her sonic, verbal, and rhetorical devices are
extremely sophisticated, encompassing Duchampian pun, phonemic bilin-
gual (French-English) transfer, paragram, ideogram, allusion, and found
text. In their complex assemblages, these function to explore such areas as
our conceptual approaches to female (and feminine) representation as well
as the power structures within which these sexualities must function. The
doll, the bride, the daughter, the mesh: these participate in any number of
games at once sexual and verbal.
Bergvall’s most orthodox Oulipo work is “Via: 48 Dante Variations,” which
recalls Harry Mathews’s “35 Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare.” Her
base text is the opening tercet of Dante’s Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

che la diritta via era smaritta

As she recalls her procedure in the headnote:

I had started to collect Dante translations like others collect stamps or

good wines, at ¤rst simply following a lead to see what might come

through, in the dark of dark, in the wood of wood, in the musical-

ised sense of panic. 1–2–3 lines, and three menace him, and the one at

the crossroads and the one who speaks and the one who remains hid-

Procedural Poetics of Bök and Bergvall 221