[silence] Cage and Oulipo 2

[Rob Haskins]

I know nothing about the Oulipians, but I think it's worth noting that in at least some of his chance-composed poems, Cage strove for a kind of sense-making.  He suggests as much in his description of renga in the preface for _Themes and Variations_--that the process of writing renga created new and unexpected meanings.  

It's true that some of his works--I'm thinking of Part 4 of _Empty Words_ and _Mureau_--are profoundly opaque (and maybe that's putting it very charitably).  But there are moments in _Anarchy,_ _Themes and Variations,_ and _I-VI_ that make quite a bit of (unconventional) sense.

Rob
 


Rob Haskins
Assistant Professor of Music
University of New Hampshire
rob_haskins@yahoo.com
http://robhaskins.net

"Heroism doesn't consist in brilliantly combatting someone else. . . .  What is heroic is to accept the situation in which you find yourself."  -- John Cage




----- Original Message ----
From: Chris Piuma <piuma@flim.com>
To: Marjorie Perloff <mperloff@earthlink.net>
Cc: silence@list.mail.virginia.edu
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 8:52:56 PM
Subject: Re: [silence] Cage and Oulipo 2

It's not "according to taste" that's at issue, though -- it would be "to have it make sense". Hence the Oulipian shortened sonnet technique (under "redundancy" in the Compendium) -- it's not just the last word, or the last syllable, or the last n letters of each line that you take -- it's as little as you can while still retaining a syntactically "intelligible" or "normative" poem.


Duchamp did spectacularly little for Oulipo except perhaps lend his name and fame to the group; he's only recorded as attending one meeting, never wrote anything Oulipian, and his entry in the Oulipo Compendium suggests he was mostly in it for the puns. Plus he seems to have joined any group or scene that would allow him...


The mesostic rule -- when Cage was composing "freehand" in it, writing "normative" poems/lectures/sentences with it -- and when he was excluding the occurrence of a key letter between the previous key letter and the following one (oof, that's a complicated rule to describe; I hope you know what I mean) -- anyway, that is absolutely an Oulipian form. "Mesostic" isn't keyed in the Compendium, but it's mentioned under "acrostic" with this parenthetical -- "John Cage published many mesostics dedicated to friends and colleagues" -- which are the "freehand" ones I was just describing, mostly, rather than, say, the Writings Through.


The N+7 is one of a number of Oulipo rules that allow for a certain measure of indeterminacy, but are still constructed so that their results are still, in some way, "sensical". But that is the real dividing line; one gets a sense from Oulipo that without the need for ending up with something "sensical", all their acrobatics are just calculations; which is the opposite of what Cage is doing.


But I'm happy to see you working on this; the synthesis of the two modes of thought is something I've been interested in for years.


I don't recall that you were at the noulipo conference last year; I seem to recall that this issue got lightly touched upon in a few of the presentations. I seem to remember Christian Bök talking about it, but I also remember him talking about something else, so... Hrm.


Yrs,


Chris.

On 19 Feb 2007, at 5:26 pm, Marjorie Perloff wrote:

 Thanks, everyone, for your prompt and good responses.  But I am not wholly convinced.  True, Oulipo descried chance but what, in practice, is the difference between, say, a mesostic rule (even if the vertical strings are generated by chance operations) and the Oulipo N+7 rule, which is not ‘unchancy” in that different dictionaries would give you a different seventh noun after the N.  Besides, Cage admits again and again that he changed the chance products “according to taste.”  
 
 The key link may be Duchamp,, who is connected to both camps.  I will try to check more fully.
 
 Marjorie Perloff

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