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on constraints
My friend Eric Burger was in town last week for the Wire's second annual Adventures In Modern Music festival, which was great fun (I may yet write up a belated list of highlights). During the day, we sat around talking about stuff, and the topic of poetic constraints came up.
In the course of these conversations, we began to notice the outlines of a sort of taxonomy of constraints. The three constraints I've posted to the site this week illustrate the three primary levels that we began to feel out in those conversations.
The first constraint is purely contextual or situational: its influence on the actual language, content, and structure of the poem is difficult to pin down precisely. We feel intuitively that a five-part poem written in five different cities and over a correspondingly broad span of time would differ from a five-part poem written in a single sitting, but even if we had these two hypothetical poems side-by-side, it might be difficult to determine which one was written according to the constraint and which one wasn't. This raises the question once again of just how much context influences / should influence our reading of a poem, a question raised a fair number of times in this blog over the past year (here; here).
The second constraint is more typical, in that it partially governs the language, content, and structure of the poem, while still leaving substantial room for creativity and maneuverability. This is what most people think of when they think of a "constraint," and most poetic forms fit comfortably within this category.
The third constraint, by contrast, governs almost all elements of the poem. A few bits of subjective intentionality persist here and there but mostly the constraint functions as a kind of "poem-generating machine": once it has been kicked into gear by the chance operation of opening that first book to a random page, the poem basically "writes itself." It's perhaps more proper to think of this as "algorithmic writing."
I think E.B. is most interested in the first sort of constraint, whereas I think I'm most interested in the third— Labels: writing |
Monday, October 04, 2004
4:38 PM
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