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Page 12 American Book Review Literary Machinery Darren Wershler-henry Writings for the Oulipo is the second of poet/ translator Ian Monk’s books to be published by Make Now Press (the first being Family Archaeology and Other Poems, 2004). The title itself declares that the matter of the book consists of a series of stylistic exercises—poems written according to one or more of the literary constraints developed over the years by the members of the French writing circle Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or the Workshop for Potential Literature). Oulipan literature is not only formal but conceptual; it usually relegates narrative content to a secondary role. For those that read poetry to delight in its artifice and in the skill of its practitioners, Oulipan literature can be a very satisfying experience; fans of the confessional lyric, or of epic narrative, though, would be advised to look elsewhere. The most effective poems in Writings for the Oulipo elicit the same uncanny fascination as any complex piece of machinery. Monk has a watchmaker ’s sensibility and pride in craft, and is at his best when soldering letters into some elegant and improbable new configuration. The question for the reader is whether all of these poems are worth winding up for a second time. The book’s opener, “Homage to Georges Perec,” is a seven-page set of six univocalisms—texts that utilize only one vowel in their construction. Later in the book, a related piece, “On G. Adair’s A Void,” critiques Adair’s translation of Perec’s La Disparation into English, without using the letter “e” (the same constraint—a lipogram—that operates in both the original and the translation). The most satisfying of these univocalisms is “Downtown,” a rewriting of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy as a sonnet: “To do or not to do: Gods, how to opt?” Univocalism is a powerful conceit, but one that has already been utilized to better effect elsewhere. Christian Bök’s Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001) is structured around the same univocalic constraint, but extends it over the length of an entire book (full disclosure: I edited Eunoia). Comparing the texts in tone and subject produces marked results. Both, for example, end up writing lurid and smutty little stories about a sexual encounter betweenAlfred Jarry’s Ubu and a woman named Lulu. Monk: Ur-tush snuffs Lulu’s musk lustful Gurus-cum-Ubus cup Lulu’s dugs Bök: Ubu cups Lulu’s dugs; Ubu rubs Lulu’s buns; thus Lulu must pull Ubu’s pud. Such synchronic echoes abound throughout the two pieces, but are likely the effect of two writers deliberately working with the same limited vocabularies rather than the result of conscious allusion on Monk’s part. (As a result of a conversation between the two writers, Bök believes that Monk wrote “Homage to Georges Perec” without knowledge of Eunoia’s existence …which is a shame, because it would have been truly entertaining to read Monk attempting to rewrite Eunoia at full length.) It’s enough to confirm, in a paranoid but nevertheless entertaining fashion, that each vowel has its own distinct personality: the U, ribald and lewd, the I, self-absorbed and romantic, and so on. As the image of the Enigma machine on the book’s cover suggests, there is a considerable element of decoding necessary for the enjoyment of Writings for the Oulipo. For those unfamiliar with Oulipan literary forms, it may be helpful to have Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie’s Oulipo Compendium (Make Now Press, 2005) close at hand while poring over the rest of this book, as there are no notes regarding the structure of the individual pieces. Monk has a watchmaker’s sensibility. Some, such as “Two Sestanagraminas,” can be puzzled out by the uninitiated. A sestina consists of six six-line stanzas followed by a three-line stanza (tercet); moreover, each stanza ends with the same words, used in different combinations each time, and the tercet contains all of these words, usually with two per line. In Monk’s sestinas, each line is also an anagram of the others, producing stanzas like the following...

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