procedures such as the palindrome (a text which can be read backwards) or
antonymy (replacing elements of a text with their grammatical or semantic
opposites). Other systems they produced were highly mathematical, and
members of Oulipo sometimes used them to produce lengthy novels such
as George Perec in Life a User’s Manual (1996) and Italo Calvino in If on a
Winter’s Night a Traveller (1992). These experiments have also been taken
up more recently by some younger poets, such as Canadian Christian Bok,
whose Eunoia (2001) uses only one vowel in each section, and was also
written under a number of other self-imposed constraints.
Working with a constraint can be very productive because it pushes
your work outwards in new directions. Because you cannot use language
freely, you have to think of other less obvious alternatives: this may bring
freshness and originality to your writing.
Using the Bernstein poem as a model, write a poem (Exercise 2b) which
is based on one (or several) homonyms, such as the words ‘lie’ or ‘die/dye’.
Then write a poem based on another type of system: this might be the
exclusion of a letter throughout a text or including a particular word in
each sentence. However, it need not be any of these: think up your own
system. What effect does this have upon your writing?
Syntax and grammar
Some poetry—including much free verse—sticks closely to normal sentence
structure and grammar. However, much poetry written throughout the last
few hundred years has not been grammatical in the sense that a piece of
prose would be. In some experimental poetry a departure from normal
grammar is particularly pronounced: the grammatical function that words
have, and their place and position in the sentence, is seriously disrupted.
Grammar can be constraining because it is hierarchical. The sentences
we use are hypotactic, that is, they contain a main clause usually with other
subordinate clauses. This has the effect of making one idea in the sentence
seem more important than others, or at least of making one central idea the
focus of the sentence. Grammar also fixes meaning, and makes it as unam-
biguous as possible. For many social uses grammar is essential because we
need to communicate with other human beings with as little ambiguity as
possible, and prioritise some aspects of our communications over others.
But in poetry we sometimes want to exploit the polysemic aspect of
language: its capacity to generate many different meanings. We want to
juxtapose ideas, and celebrate their co-existence, without locking them into
a structure where one is subordinate to another. More generally, grammar
is the product of a particular social context, and can be identified with the
hegemonic culture: in many cases western imperialism. Non-Anglo-Celtic
Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 175