Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

language to language and is potentially translatable. Indeed, says Roubaud,
the passage of free verse across frontiers is metrically duty-free (205).
The “death of Alexander,” by this argument, is inevitable in the would-be
egalitarian twentieth and twenty-¤rst centuries. The common wisdom goes
something like this: (1) Verse is not necessarily poetry, (2) conversely, then,
poetry is not equivalent to verse, and hence, (3) verse is of no importance (La
vieillesse d’Alexandre 10). Contemporary poetry criticism, Roubaud further
suggests, has followed suit. Even when it is concerned with poems written in
¤xed verse forms, it pays no attention to prosody, discussing the texts in
question as if they were in fact written in prose. All of us have experienced
this situation. On an oral exam I once asked a student who was writing a
dissertation on Shelley to name the verse form of “Adonais” and of “Ode to
the West Wind.” He was at a complete loss.
But the apparent hegemony of free verse, Roubaud suggests, was never all
that complete. The key ¤gure in this story is Mallarmé, whose Crise de vers
(1896), cited in my epigraph above, performs the crucial analysis of the rela-
tion of verse to language itself. Let me again cite the passage, which refers to
the modernist state of the art:

Loyal practitioners of the alexandrine, our hexameter, unhinge from

within the meter of this rigid and puerile mechanism. The ear, freed

from a factitious counting, takes joy in discerning, on its own, all the

possible combinations of twelve tones.^2

Roubaud calls this “a marvelously Schoenbergian Utopian de¤nition of a
new alexandrine, where all the possibilities of twelve—not in the arithmeti-
cal sense, the current impoverished sense according to which mathematics is
no more than a rigid, puerile, and facticious counting—but where a hieratic
rhy thmic entity with almost in¤nite variety, would be in play (for the new
jouissance of the ear)” (53).
Roubaud is referring here to the “mathematical” poetry of Oulipo (the
Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), a poetry that unlike the ubiquitous free
verse paradigm on the one hand, and the traditional metrical forms of the
New Formalists on the other, is produced by those “restrictions of a formal
nature” known as constraints. As Roubaud puts it in his “Introduction” to
The Oulipo and Combinatorial Art (1991):

Obviously a complex relation exists between the requirements of an

outwardly imposed rule and the artist’s inner freedom. (This is why

Procedural Poetics of Bök and Bergvall 207