learn from the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, were inter-
ested “not merely in the rhy thmic ®ow of the narration following distinctive
patterns of line and syllable count”; they also looked for such sound effects
as “alliteration, sound-imitating words, sonorous names... appositives...
lyrical evocations and inversions of normal word order.”^12 Or again, in Tang
dynasty poetry (usually considered China’s Golden Age), what was called
“regulated verse” consisted of a prescribed eight-line stanza, distinguished
by its level-tone rhyme, falling at the end of each couplet. Tang regulated
verse also had speci¤c rules governing the distribution of parallelism. “Each
component in the ¤rst line [is] matched by a grammatically similar and se-
mantically related, yet tonally antithetical, component in the corresponding
position of the second line, thus forming a perfect mirror effect.” “The co-
herence of the poem’s phonic pattern,” moreover, is “governed by the cumu-
lative effect of contrast (dui) and connection (nian)” (Encyclopedia of Poetry
194). For Tang dynasty aesthetic, the successful poem was one whose elabo-
rate mathematical form could accommodate personal lyric vision.
Procedural poetry, in this scheme of things, marks a return to tradition—
but not quite the Englit tradition the New Formalists long to re-create. Con-
sider again the adage that “A text written according to a constraint describes
the constraint.” A recent exemplar of this axiom is Christian Bök’s Eunoia,
published in Toronto by Coach House Press in 2001 and to everyone’s amaze-
ment, since it is hardly a standard volume of poetry, the recipient of the Grif-
¤n Poetry Prize for 2002. In the postface to this one-hundred-page book, Bök
explains the book’s particular constraint as follows:
“Eunoia” is the shortest word in English to contain all ¤ve vowels,
and the word quite literally means “beautiful thinking.” Eunoia is a
univocal lipogram, in which each chapter restricts itself to the use of
a single vowel. Eunoia is directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo...
the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with
extreme formalistic constraints. The text makes a Sisyphean spectacle
of its labour, willfully crippling its language in order to show that, even
under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express
an uncanny, if not sublime, thought.^13Bök’s chief model was probably Georges Perec’s La Disparition, the tour-
de-force novel written without the letter e—a feat almost impossible in
French, depending, as it does, on approximately one-eighth of the total lexi-
con. Gilbert Adair’s translation, A Void, does the same thing in English. La
Disparition followed Roubaud’s central rule in making the constraint the
216 Chapter 11