CHAPTER U for Zhu YuKultur spurns Ubu—thus Ubu pulls stunts. Ubu shuns Skulp-
tur; Uruk urns (plus busts), Zulu jugs (plus tusks). Ubu scripts
junk für Kunst und Glück. Ubu busks. Ubu drums drunks, plus
Ubu strums cruths (such hubbub, such ruckus): thump, thump,
thrum, thrum. Ubu puns puns. Ubu blurts untruth: much bunkum
(plus bull), much humbug (plus bunk)—but trustful schmucks
trust such untruthful stuff; thus Ubu (cult guru) must bluff
dumbstruck numbskulls (such chumps). Ubu mulcts surplus
funds (trust funds plus slush funds). Ubu usurps much usufruct.
Ubu sums up lump sums Ubu trumps dumb luck.Bear in mind, as you read these curiously dissimilar “stanzas,” Bök’s rule
that “the text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel.” The poet has not, in
other words, chosen particularly silly-sounding U words or harsh A ones, for
he must, in the course of the poem, use all the A’s, E’s, etc. What the poem
thus teaches us is that, Saussure notwithstanding, vowels do have semantic
overtones. A poetics of A, to begin with, evokes an alien, often exotic East:
Hassan, Agha Khan, Arab, Mahabharata, cabal, pagan, fatwa, bachannal,
altar, naphtha, maharajah, bak lava, Tartar, drachmas, mandala, Cassandra,
karma, Allah, Sahara, Rwanda, Shah, Ghana, Katar, Japan, Samarkand,
Kandahar, Madagascar, lava sand®at. In the Western world that exoticism
is transferred to A Dada bard as daft as Tzara. A poetics thus involves awk -
ward grammar that appalls a craftsman. Dada, we know, always involved
the destruction of “normal” syntax and preferred a slapdash arc and a back-
ward zag to the orderly stanza or ballad. Again, A art seems to be largely
abstract: a pagan skald chants a dark saga. The authors associated with A
lack the gentleness of E or lightness of I: they include such heavies as Kant
and Kaf ka, Marx and the revolutionary Marat. No doubt, this is because A
is not only the letter of the exotic East but also of the law and of bans.
E poetics could hardly be more different. We prefer, as Bök puts it in the
stanza following the one cited here, genteel speech, where sense redeems
senselessness. E is mostly genteel and soft-spoken—the language of the
French esthetes. The E poet is a revered exegete who is familiar with but
rejects metred verse: the sestet, the tercet. If A poetry is abstract, E is the
language of cleverness—perhaps a shade too clever, since that quality can
exceed decent levels. E poets may be primarily clever like Jules Ve r n e or
masters of riddling like the surrealist Benjamin Péret or the Oulipo master
Georges Perec. The work of such writers can appear too tricky: We sneer
when we detect the clever scheme. But then of course, despite all its gentle-
Procedural Poetics of Bök and Bergvall 219