Eunoia

"She resembles the lewdest jezebel."

I ran into the book Eunoia at the Harvard Book Store a few months ago and couldn't take my hands off it. It's a series of prose poems by Christian Bök arranged in chapters, each of which only uses one vowel. I was too broke at the time to buy it, so I checked it out from the library. But sometimes you just have to buy a book, so when I saw it at the Strand Bookstore in New York, I decided to add it to my collection, along with Bök's Crystallography.

I really don't know where I've been, that I hadn't come across this stuff yet. Besides the gimmicks of the vowel restraints, there is also accented internal rhyme and syntactic parallelism, which really aren't any more of a restraint (or any less), so it sort of shows that the restraints (or constraints, I guess) of Oulipo aren't really gimmicks at all, any more than iambic pentameter. How can one have a totally serious relationship with tradition and form in this century? I mean, look at the last one!

from CHAPTER I

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit,
scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I
sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining
sighs with trifling gimmicks - impish
hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn't
it glib? Isn't it chic? I fit childish
insights within rigid limits, writing
shtick which might instill priggish
misgivings in critics blind with hindsight.
I dismiss nitpicking criticism which
flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I
kibitz - griping whilst criticizing
dimwits, sniping whilst indicting
nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking,
in which philippic wit is still illicit.

I don't see how this can't be considered major work. This passage seems to be about Bök's project itself, but how can you argue with "I dismiss nitpicking criticism which
flirts with philistinism."? What's interesting, too, is how it looks on the page. Each chapter has a different look and sound to it, which gives each a different tenor. In case anyone ever wondered whether the sound of a word affects its meaning, here is your answer: it infects it.