Euonia

I know that when people hear the words "contemporary poet" they automatically conjure up an image (which I have spoken about before, check out the poetry slam post)that doesn't reflect even half of the poets out there working today. Besides the beatniks everyone knows, about there are tons of other subsets that work with really unuque forms and ideas.

One such subset are the extreme formalists (my name for them)or experiemental poets (their name for themselves).

These people are the poets who double as math guys or philosophers (yes they are out there, the math/english hybrid exisst!) and make up really complex rule systems for poetry then try to come up with a poem that fulfills all requirements.

The perfect example of someone like this is Christien Bok, whose book Euonia, came out in 2005 and has garnered a hefty following. Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that has all the vowels in it. In the book, he writes poems dedicated to people who have only one vowel sound in their name and then only uses that one vowel sound throughout the entire piece. For example Yoko Ono has the "O" poem dedicated to her.

here are the rules he set for himself:

only have one vowel sound - for example all the words in one poem only have the vowel "e" in them, no other vowel is found through the entire piece (which is about fifteen pages long in most cases)

must contain a banquet

must contain a nautical adventure

must reference writing in some way

following these rules, it took him seven years to complete the book. And just in case you, like me, thought there was some really accessible list of all words that only contain one vowel sound, there's not...he used the dictionary...scary scary

Along with these rules, he nuances each poem to reflect what he feels the nature of the vowel is. For example, the vowel "u" in Bok's opinion is lusty, so his "u" poem reflects this attribute.

Sounds horrendously complex right? well, it is. However, people have been setting up these impossible situations since the very beginning of poetry. For example, the epic medevial poets had to work with very strict requirements in terms of line length and rhyme and those poems could go on for hundreds of pages (think shakespeare, or Canterbury Tales, by Chaucer)

Bok isn't the only one out there either. The next couple of posts are going to highlight some of these formalists and the ways they are paving the way for a re-introduction of strict requirements in an era all about the free verse.

here is a link to a website that will let you listen to a lot of the poems found in Eunoia. It's really neat to listen to...check it out!
http://www.ubu.com/sound/bok.html