ness and gentility, E is the language of stress, of wretchedness, dejected-
ness, and the deepest regrets, which are invariably secret.
I poetics initially presents itself as light and tripping, the language of wit
and impish hijinks. I is the realm of writing and singing as well as of criti-
cism. But criticism that resists nitpick ing in favor of philippic wit. Isn’t
it glib? Isn’t it chic? asks the poet. And why not: in later sections of I, we
meet singing birds, six k inds (¤nch, sisk in, ibis, tit, pipit, swift), whistling
shrill chirps, trilling chirr chirr in high pitch. For Bök, this I world is the
charmed world of gliding ®ight, sk imming limpid springs. No fatwa here,
no long and heav y Mahabharata. Yet lightness of being may contain the
seeds of its own destruction: I note that I is also the lexicon of crippling and
wincing, cringing, spitting, and itching, of the riding whip and the Blitz.
Even as A’s abstraction can veer toward exotic fantasy on one hand, serious
philosophical thought (Kant, Marx), on the other, I is slippery: Klimt and
Liszt are its emblematic artists.
I take Bök’s O chapter to be the most solemn and scholarly. O, as Bök
presents it, is the language of the book, of school, and of the Word. God is
also an O-word. In Bök’s sequence, much is made of Ox ford dons, provosts,
and proctors, of schoolrooms containing books and rococo scrolls—both
on worn morocco. Schoolbooks bear old colophons. Monks belong here, as
do the dorms where Oxford dons hold forth. But again the reverse side op-
erates as well: O gives us the world of tombs and donjons, of Sodom and
Moloc h, of the mondo doloroso of Job and Lot, of porn shops and blond
trollops. The Wor d has never been taken more to heart. And the emblematic
poet of O poetics is none other than Wordsworth.
None of this can fully prepare us for Bök’s U chapter. In English, U is the
dirty vowel—the emblem of slut, lust, fuck, cunt, dugs, humps, bum, stuffs,
rumps, crud, bust—one could go on and on. This is Bök’s shortest chapter,
because monovocalic words with U are much less common than those with
the other vowels and also, as we see here, much less varied. Bök can write
about Ubu here, but Alfred Jarry’s hero is one of the only authors available
in the U pantheon. True, there is the biblical Ruth and Krenek’s Lulu, but we
¤nd neither philosophers nor poets in this chapter. The only art in the U-
world is sculpture, but here perceived as primarily junk sculpture; the one
musical instrument is the drum, the one gourmet dish is duck, served, pos-
sibly, with rum punch. Not much variation here, not much ¤nesse, delicacy,
lightness, or the exotic other. Yet, before we write off U words entirely, we
should remember that this is the chapter of truth and of those who blush
when they violate it.
Eunoia thus differentiates the vowels only to imply, in the end, that there
220 Chapter 11