world is made up so (Adam didn’t so much
name as delineate). Every poem’s got
a prosodic lining, some of which will
unzip for summer wear.The lines of an
imaginary are inscribed on the
social flesh by the knifepoint of history.
Nowadays, you can often spot a work
of poetry by whether it’s in lines
or no; if it’s in prose, there’s a good chance
it’s a poem.While there is no lesson in
the line more useful than that of the pick-
et line, the line that has caused the most ad-
versity is the bloodline. In Russia
everyone is worried about long lines;
back in the USA, it’s strictly soup-
lines. “Take a chisel to write,” but for an
actor a line’s got to be cued. Or, as
they say in math, it takes two lines to make
an angle but only one lime to make
a Margarita.‘Of Time and the Line’ (Bernstein 1991, pp. 42–3)The word ‘line’ is what we call a homonym: that is, it is a word which has
many different meanings. Homonyms are commonplace in all kinds of
poetry and are often used by poets to pivot from one meaning to another.
But Bernstein pushes the homonym to an extreme where it becomes the
focal point of the poem.
Bernstein’s poem sets itself a task or limit: every sentence has to exploit
the meaning of the word ‘line’. We have already seen in Chapter 3, with
regard to numerical structures, how setting limits can be very liberating
and reap creative results. Try and think of other linguistic games of this
kind that you can play, and other limits that you can set.
The members of the French group Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature
Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature), founded in 1960, set
many such rules for themselves (Motte 1986; Mathews & Brotchie 1998).
Members of Oulipo included George Perec, Raymond Queneau, Harry
Mathews and Italo Calvino and their experiments were wide-ranging. For
example, George Perec reinvented the lipogram, in which the author leaves
out one particular letter throughout the text (Perec himself wrote a whole
novel without the letter e). Members of Oulipo used countless other
174 The Writing Experiment