The Oulipo factor: the procedural poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The French Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) has long experimented with procedural or rule-governed poetics, its members creating elaborate numerical constraints that a given text must follow. Jacques Roubaud and Michel Benabou, for example, collected hundreds of alexandrines, broke them into hemistichs and recombined the latter so as to create a whole set of new poems, the purpose being to show the possibilities of the alexandrine as verse form. Indeed, in his brilliant critical study La Vieillesse d’Alexandre, Jacques Roubaud makes the case for a new ‘formal’ poetry that by no means uses standard metrics. The poetry of constraint is finally catching on in the English-speaking world, providing an alternative to the self-centred, slack, ‘unpoetic’ free verse that has become ubiquitous. The cardinal rule of procedural poetics is that the constraint in question is not just a formal device but becomes a thematic property of the poem or fiction. This article discusses recent procedural poetry in English, beginning with the example of Harry Matthews’ ‘35 variations on a theme from Shakespeare’, and then focusing on the work of two younger poets, the Canadian Christian Bök and the English poet Caroline Bergvall. Bök’s Eunoia is an inverted lipogram, its five sections each built on a single vowel, A, E, I, O, U, and submitting its words to a series of other rules. The long poem demonstrates what sound repetition does and can do in poetry. Bergvall’s VIA, a rule-governed sequence based on translations of the first tercet of Dante’s Inferno, is another brilliant tour de force. Her more recent ‘About face’, while not, strictly speaking, a rule-governed composition, uses pun, sound play and elaborate verbal device to create a composition whose sonic artifice stands in sharp opposition to the typical lineated but otherwise quite prosaic verse that is now the norm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".