Some emphasize the darkness of the wood, others the darkness of the speak-
er’s consciousness, unable as she is to ¤nd the straight road, the right path,
the narrow way, the rightful pathway, or the true road. In Oulipo terms, the
sequence enacts its constraint because there is no progress, no “direct path”
or “path that does not stray” to take us out of the maze of alternate tercets.
Via is Vita, no more, no less.
Like Mathews’s “35 Variations,” Bergvall’s poem thus demonstrates the
power of the poetic word. Dante’s tercet has three basic strands: the middle
of one’s life, the dark wood, and the crossroads where the true path is lost.
These three topoi can be varied in countless ways to create a riveting narra-
tive. Who is speaking? How did that speaker come to be in this obscure place?
And how do we know the path he’s on is not the right one? What is a “true”
path, any way? Since the reader does not know whose these translations are,
s/he concentrates on the differentials, especially the issue of cause in the
third line: is the path “lost to view” to mankind, or is it that “I had missed
the path and gone astray” (#44)?
“Via” is a fascinating exercise, but even more interesting are such Bergvall
sound performance works as her recent “About Face” (part 2 of her larger
project, Goan Atom), notes and early drafts of which may be found in a recent
issue of How 2.^15 “About Face” is not a rule-governed composition, although
the title pun is exploited in just about every line of the poem, which is twelve
manuscript pages long.^16 In a note on the poem, Bergvall explains:
“About Face” started out in 1999 for a performance in which I was
interested to explore the format of a reading-performance as an ex-
plicit balancing between audibility and inaudibility (the listener’s/
viewer’s)... between what you see and cannot hear, what you hear and
cannot see.... the piece was more structured and articulated by word
and sound associations (“faceless” leads by contraction and code-shift
to “fesse” [French for buttock] and openness to accidents, rather than
as a procedural or constraint-led piece.^17Bergvall goes on to say that she used interrupted transcripts of recorded con-
versations so as to foreground “social opacity and historical erasures.” Then
too the form enabled her to re®ect on “games of face in relation to intimacy,
love, intimate pleasure” and to test such common oppositions as that be-
tween Hellenic/Christian concepts of the face as a marker of presence and
Judaic/Moorish traditions in which “face” can only be “symbolic/inscriptive.”
“The acrobatics of trying to write face,” writes Bergvall, “leads to re®ecting
on it as a speech act.”
Procedural Poetics of Bök and Bergvall 223