‘The tedium is the message.’
–Darren Wershler
‘Eunoia’ is the shortest word in English to contain all five 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 (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) – the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints. The text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labour, wilfully 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.
Eunoia abides by many subsidiary rules. All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few words do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, mono-chord and tumulus). The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.
‘Oiseau’ (the French word for ‘bird’) is the shortest word in French to contain all five vowels. Oiseau pays tribute to the French precedents for Eunoia. ‘Voyelles,’ by Arthur Rimbaud, is the fabled French sonnet about the ‘colours’ of the vowels, and the English translation entitled ‘Vowels’ strives to convey both the meaning and measure of the original. ‘Phonemes’ is a homo-vocalic translation of ‘Voyelles’, preserving the original sequence of the vowels.‘Veils’ is a homophonic translation of ‘Voyelles’, preserving the original voicing of the sounds. ‘Vocables’ is a perfect anagram of the French sonnet, and ‘AEIOU’ literalizes the title of ‘Voyelles’ by excising, from the poem, everything that is not a vowel.
‘And Sometimes’ itemizes every English word that contains only consonants. ‘Vowels’ is an anagrammatic text, permuting the fixed array of letters found in the title. ‘H’ is a visual sonnet constructed from the favourite letter of bpNichol – and the structure of this image is modelled upon the rhyme scheme found in the poem by Arthur Rimbaud. ‘W’ is an elegy for the favourite letter of Georges Perec, who (like bpNichol) admires one of the few consonants that can make a vowel sound.‘Emended Excess’exhausts vocabulary unsuitable for use in the retelling of the Iliad.
Eunoia has required years of perseverance to complete, and the book owes its success to the devoted support of many patient friends: Bruce Andrews, Derek Beaulieu, Charles Bernstein, Stan Bevington, Stephen Cain, Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith, Scott Griffin, Neil Hennessy, Carl Johnston, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, Evan Munday, Christina Palassio, Marjorie Perloff, Rick/Simon, Brian Kim Stefans, Alana Wilcox and Suzanne Zelazo. Special thanks to Darren Wershler (who drove the car while I read Perec) and to Natalee Caple (who let me work while she slept). Thanks, as always, to Brigitte Schnell for her constant devotion.
Excerpts from this book have appeared over the years in the following magazines: Arras, Big Allis, Blood and Aphorisms (B+A), The Capilano Review, Contemporary Verse 2 (CV2),Geist, Harper’s, Open Letter, Queen Street Quarterly and Wordscapes. Excerpts have also appeared in the following anthologies: Blues and True Concussions: Six New Toronto Poets (House of Anansi Press, 1996), The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (House of Anansi Press, 2002), In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry (Polestar, 2005), Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea Books, 2005), Af LjoÝum (Nyhil Press, 2005), Blue Light, Clear Atoms: Poetry for Senior Students (MacmillanEducation, 2006), Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology (Roof Books, 2007), The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner Poetry, 2007), The /n/oulipian Analects (Les Figues Press, 2007), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street Editions, 2008), Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (Pearson Education, 2009) and The Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take on the World (Exile Editions, 2009).