Alison James /Cerisy Summer 2009

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Q & A session

 The term “formalism,” as applied to literary creation, can mean either formal experimentation or the use of established forms. Generally speaking, the first sense prevails in the French context (where experimental writers are often accused of formalism), the second in the American, where the “New Formalists” are poets who favor traditional meter, rhyme, and fixed forms. I examine this tension between formal innovation and formal tradition through a consideration of two tendencies that emerge in the American poetry of the 1970s and 80s: New Formalism and Language poetry. As a counterpoint, I consider the work of the (primarily, but not exclusively French) Oulipo group, whose writers use the notion of potentiality to reconcile tradition and experimentation. Finally, I argue that the “post-Language” adoption of Oulipian methods by contemporary Anglophone poets reveals the ambiguous status of poetic form at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

New Formalism: fixed form

“New Formalism” is a label that originates with (hostile) critics in the mid 1980s (see McPhillips 2003: 4–5), but that has been explicitly taken up by many (although not all) of the poets thus designated.1 For the group’s detractors, the expression is simply an oxymoron (Ron Silliman refers to “the bad old formalisms of the bad New Formalists” [2002]). According to the poets themselves, the return to traditional form is a rebellion against the conformist status quo of free verse poetry (Gioia 1987: 15). Hence the anthology title Rebel Angels, which attempts to inscribe the movement within an avant-gardist logic of rupture. In negative terms, these poets define themselves against the institutionalization of poetic practice in workshops and creative writing classes, against the orthodoxy of free verse, against the predominance of “confessional” writing, against university “elitism,” against (French) “theory,” and against the “linguistic exercises” of experimental poetry (Gioia 1987: 23; Steele 1990: 291 ; Leithauser 1983: 152; McDowell 1989: 100). On the more positive side, the New Formalists aim for clarify expression and for an engagement with popular traditions, as well as with narrative, in order to expand the role of poetry in cultural life (New Formalism is often associated with New Narrative Poetry, under the rubric of “Expansive Poetry”).2

At first glance, the New Formalist rejection of free verse might seem close to the Oulipian rejection of the illusion of literary freedom, and in particular to Jacques Roubaud’s sharp criticism of “international free verse,” (1995: 39). Roubaud’s definition of poetry as “the memory of language” (1995: 23, 101) seems very close to Dana Gioia’s claim that poetry is the “collective memory” of a culture (1987: 16). However, Gioia’s conception of “culture” is conservative in a way that Roubaud’s “language” is not. For Roubaud, poetry is defined by rhythm, which presupposes meter (1988: 111), yet he does not simply advocate the return to traditional forms; rather, he imagines a renewal of poetry which does not erase the past (1988: 56–57). Roubaud’s poetics is Oulipian insofar as it seeks the unrealized potentialities of existing fixed forms and poetic traditions. The New Formalist relationship to tradition, on the other hand, does not seem to leave space for formal variation and renewal. When New Formalist meter is not merely monotonous, the gap between traditional form and contemporary everyday language can produce (voluntary or involuntary) comic effects (Vikram Seth’s “novel in verse” The Golden Gate [1986] often seems to play upon this ambiguity). However, such incongruities point to the absence of any true reinvention of poetic forms.

The New Formalist conception of form, unlike Roubaud’s, is profoundly unhistorical (on this point see Perloff, 2003). It is often based on a conception of meter as natural (Turner and Poppel 1985: 113).3 Both politically and aesthetically ambiguous, New Formalist poetics ultimately rests on a profound ambivalence toward form itself. The Rebel Angels anthology, for instance, self-consciously and pedagogically classifies and indexes the forms illustrated by its poems (from anacreontics to pentameter; from blank verse to the villanelle)—thus suggesting that these forms are not, in fact,  active components of our cultural memory. While putting a premium on technique, the editors explicitly exclude any “merely formal” poetry or “exercises in prosody” (Jarman and Mason 1996: xix); it seems that form is simultaneously the whole point, and beside the point.

Language Poetry: form deformed

Like New Formalism, the Language poetry of the 1970s and 1980s breaks with the claims to naturalness of the free verse poem (Barone and Gannick 1994: xiv), yet it also rejects the association of form and nature. The movement (to the extent that it is possible to speak of a collective project) mobilizes elements of “poststructuralist” thought in order to support its conception of language as “the material of both thinking and writing”  (Bernstein 1982: 7) and to develop a “specific critique of reference as the semantic dominant” (McCaffery 1986: 112). Ron Silliman, for example, uses the notion of “linguistic fetishism” to associate capitalism and the referential illusion (Silliman 1977: 11–12), and he adopts the anti-narrative (or at least anti-novelistic) approach that he calls “the New Sentence”: a way of keeping the reader’s attention close to the level of the sentence by limiting syllogistic movement, and by considering sentences and paragraphs as units of measure rather than logic (Silliman 1977: 91).

Silliman’s “New Sentences” and the work of other Language writers deploy strategies of mimetism and montage that aim to disrupt existing discourses and forms. They often focus on the material aspect of language: the signifier, syntax, sound, and the visual arrangement of words on a page. Yet this project is rarely theorized in terms of “form” as such; Barrett Watten uses the expression “total syntax” to describe the temporal and spatial organization of the work of art; McCaffery prefers to speak of textual “economy” rather than form (1986: 200); Lyn Hejinian takes up the Russian Formalists’ opposition between the “constructive principle” and the “material” (1985: 275); Charles Bernstein uses the term “measure” to designate “something we discover in writing poetry not something we assume” (1982: 15). It is in this sense that the formalism of Language writing approaches the formless, or rather the de-formed, given that “all writing exists in form, in shape, as mode, in a style, in genres” (ibid.). Bernstein’s ironic proposal for establishing a “Nude Formalist” school (1989; 1999: 11, 33) should be seen not only as a satirical take on New Formalism, but more positively as a formulation that reveals his concern with the denuding of form—the revealing and disassembling of formal norms, a kind of writing that operates both with and against conventions. 

It might be useful in this context to distinguish between form, understood as a characteristic of a text, and procedure, designating a process of undoing an established form in order to construct a new one.4 These terminological issues aside, the procedures adopted by Language poets sometimes resemble Oulipian constraints; for instance David Melnick’s Men in Aida, based on a homophonic translation of the Greek text of the Iliad (in Silliman 1986: 94), or Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (1987), a poetic autobiography composed (in the first version) of 37 paragraphs of 37 sentences each, each paragraph corresponding to a year in the poet’s life.

Oulipo/noulipo 

The current interest in the Oulipo among many contemporary Anglophone writers can be seen to emerge from the Language and post-Language exploration of procedures, rather than the New Formalist return to tradition. This is clear from the proceedings of the “noulipo” conference held at CalArts in October 2005, an event that included members of the Oulipo (Ian Monk, Paul Fournel), poets often associated with Language writing (Bernadette Mayer, Johanna Drucker), and writers from a new generation, who seem to have been influenced both by Language and by the Oulipo, but who do not constitute a well-defined group. To mention just three examples: the Canadian poet Christian Bök is the author of a book composed of a series of monovocalic texts (Eunoia, 2001); Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping With the Dictionary (2002) is partly inspired by the Oulipo’s N+7 method; and Doug Nufer’s Never Again (2004), is a novel of 160 pages in which no word is repeated.

The “n” of noulipo ostensibly alludes to the unknown quantity in mathematics, to the N+7 method, to the “new,” to the French “nous” (us), and to the Yiddish question “nu” (so? well? what’s new?) (Viegener and Wertheim 2007: 103). However, it can be seen to stand not only for the renewal of the Oulipian project, but also for a disavowal of this project: “no Oulipo” or “not Oulipo.” Although they praise the liberating powers of constraint, the demystification of inspiration, and the Oulipo’s invention of new forms, most of the noulipo participants emphasize their adaptation of Oulipo-inspired methods to suit their own purposes. Furthermore, Christian Bök criticizes the Oulipo on two grounds: first, it does not make explicit its political stance (Bök 2007a: 157); second, its interest in “obsolete, literary genres” and its “grammatical, referential bias” make it insufficiently radical in aesthetic terms (Bök 2007b: 222). A third criticism leveled at the Oulipo takes the form of a performance piece by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young: entitled “Foulipo,” it involved the two poets removing then replacing their clothes, while reading two “constrained” texts (one using N+7, the other involving a simplified form of Oulipian “asphyxiation” or “slenderizing”—i.e., the removal of the letter “r”). Beyond its shock value, the piece commented on the lack of dialogue between two traditions, the body-based performance art (often created by women) of the 1970s, and the male-dominated field of constrained writing  (Spahr and Young 2007: 11–12).

What unites these criticisms is a conception of avant-garde practice that tends to conflate poetic experimentation and political radicalism: Bök refers to the “ideology” of referential writing and to the “capital economy of meaning” (2007b: 222); Spahr and Young are concerned with the political limitations of experimental poetics, but still assume that constrained writing claims to be radical. What is overlooked or misunderstood in these criticisms is that the Oulipo does not position itself as an avant-garde group in this sense. In the American context more generally, the Oulipo is often viewed through the distorting lens of a discourse that polarizes poetry into two camps: tradition (associated with conservatism) versus innovation (politically and aesthetically avant-garde). In accordance with the Language poetry tradition, literary conventions and narrative forms are seen as politically suspect; hence the poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s complaint that the Oulipo “embraced a blandly conservative narrative fiction which seems to bury the very interesting procedures that went into creating the works” (Goldsmith 2001). In this context, the reception of the Oulipo, or rather the reconfiguration of Oulipian constraint, attests to the ambiguities of formal experimentation within a contemporary poetic current that conceives of itself as fundamentally oppositional, but does not commit itself to a particular identity or mode of writing (see the recent debates over the awkward term “post-avant,” often used to characterize this tendency).

Spahr and Young’s performance does raise important questions about the link between formal experimentation and the sociology of the literary group. Once again, such debates emerge from, and aim to address, the anxieties of contemporary avant-gardism (or even of the “post-avant”). While some critics attribute the end of the literary avant-garde to a crisis in the notion of community (Kaufmann 1997: 5–6), Bök envisages the continuation of the avant-garde project on the basis of more open collectivities: not the Oulipian “coterie” but curatorial sites such as Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb, (Bök 2007: 157). Spahr and Young, on the other hand, suggest that even this form of organization might entail certain kinds of exclusion. These poets thus look beyond the problem of textual forms in order to re-imagine the institutional and social forms within which poetic creation takes place.

Works Cited

Ashton, Jennifer

2007 “Our Bodies, Our Poems,” Modern Philology 105.1: 160–177.

 

Barone, Dennis and Peter Gannick (ed.)

1994 The Art of Practice: Forty-Five Contemporary Poets (Elmwood, Connecticut: Potes & Poets Press).

 

Bernstein, Charles

1982       “Thought’s Measure,” Open Letter 5.1: 7–22.

1989 The Nude Formalism (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press).

1999 My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: Chicago University Press).

 

Bök, Christian

2001 Eunoia (Toronto, Coach House Books).  

2007a “Oulipo and Its Unacknowledged Legislation,” in Viegener and Wertheim 2007: 157–158.

2007b “UbuWeb and Intentional Freedom,” in Viegener and Wertheim 2007: 221–223.

 

Finch, Annie

         1990 “In Defense of Meter,” Hellas, 1.1: 121–25.

1994, ed. A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (Brownesville [Oregon]: Story Line Press).

 

Gioia, Dana

1987 “Notes on the New Formalism,” in The Hudson Review, reprinted in Gwynn 1999: 15–27.

 

Goldsmith, Kenneth

         2001 Interview with Erik Belgum, Read Me 4.

2006 "A Response to Foulipo," Drunken Boat 8.

 

Gwynn, R. S. (ed.)

1999 New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, History (Ashland [Oregon]: Story Line Press).

 

Hejinian, Lyn

1985 “The Rejection of Closure,” in Writing/Talks, ed. Bob Perelman, 270–291 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press).

1987 [1980] My Life (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon).

 

Jarman, Mark, and David Mason (dir.)

1996 Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (Brownville [Oregon]: Story Line Press).

 

Kaufmann, Vincent

1997 Poétique des groupes littéraires (Avant-gardes 1920-1970) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France).

Leithauser, Brad

1983 “Metrical Illiteracy,” The New Criterion, reprinted in Gwynn 1999: 148–156.

 

McCaffery, Steve

1986 North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973–1986 (New York: Roof Books/Toronto: Nightwood Edition.

 

McDowell, Robert

1989 “The New Narrative Poetry,” in Feirstein 1989: 100–110.

 

McPhillips, Robert

2003 The New Formalism: A Critical Introduction (Charlotte [North Carolina]: Volcanic Ash Books).

 

Messerli, Douglas

            1987 “Language” Poetries: An Anthology (New York: New Directions).

 

Mullen, Harryette

2002 Sleeping with the Dictionary (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press).

 

Nufer, Doug

2004 Never Again (New York : Black Square Editions).

 

Perloff, Marjorie

1991 Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

2003 “The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall,” Jacket 23.

 

Roubaud, Jacques

1988 [1978] La Vieillesse d’Alexandre. Essai sur quelques états récents du vers français, second edition (Paris: Éditions Ramsay).

1995 Poésie, etcetera: ménage (Paris: Stock).

Scappetone, Jennifer

2007 “Response to Jennifer Ashton: Bachelorettes, Even: Strategic Embodiment in Contemporary Experimentalism by Women,” Modern Philology 105.1: 178–184.

 

Seth, Vikram

1986 The Golden Gate (New York: Random House).

 

Shepherd, Reginald

            2008 “Who You Callin’ ‘Post-Avant’?” Harriet blog at The Poetry Foundation.

 

Silliman, Ron

1977 The New Sentence (New York : Roof Books).

1986 ed. In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry (Orono [Maine]: National Poetry Foundation).     

 

Spahr, Juliana & Stephanie Young

2007 “‘& and’ and foulipo,” in Viegener and Wertheim 2007: 5–13.

 

Turner, Frederick and Ernst Poppel

1985 “The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, The Brain, and Time,” reprinted in Gwynn 1999: 86–119.

 

Viegener, Matias and Christine Wertheim (eds.)

2007 The noulipian Analects (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press).

 

Watten, Barrett

            1985 Total Syntax (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press).