Afterword

I. Early Methods

In April of 1990, I received a postcard from Jackson Mac Low. He and I had been writing back and forth intermittently following his having taught at the university I was attending. In his note, Jackson asked if I had copies of his French Sonnets or Words nd Ends from Ez, and if not, would I like him to send them to me? I didn’t have either of the books and soon wrote back to say that I’d love to have them.

It wasn’t long after replying to his postcard that I began wondering about the books now headed my way. In the past I’d noticed that the titles of Jackson’s books or sequences often bore some relation not only to the content of the poems, but also to the methods he’d employed in writing them.1 I already knew something about Words nd Ends from Ez, having heard Jackson speak of these poems and having read the ones included in Representative Works: 1938-1985, but I’d never heard of French Sonnets, so I became especially curious about the book. What about the poems would be French? In what ways would they be sonnets? I looked in local book stores and in the university’s library but couldn’t find a copy of the book. While I was waiting for the books to show up in the mail I kept thinking about the poems, and I began to imagine several methods Jackson might have used in writing them. Later on that same month I decided I would put one of these imagined methods to use myself.

Several years earlier I’d stolen my mother’s copy of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, an all-French edition2 put out by Doubleday in 1961. Opening the book I chose a poem at random: “Le Serpent Qui Danse.” Starting with the poem’s title, I went through The Random House Collegiate Dictionary looking for each of the words in the poem. Obviously, since I was using an English dictionary, I wasn’t able to find most of them. Instead I located the word that would have followed Baudelaire’s alphabetically, had it been in the dictionary. Once I’d located this English word I wrote it into my translation in the same location its French partner had occupied in the original. In this way in the title “Serpent” was replaced with “Serpent,” and “Danse” was replaced with “Dap.” I didn’t change proper nouns. When I located an English word for use and saw that it was noted in the dictionary as having French origins and that its spelling hadn’t changed when it crossed over to English, I substituted the word that followed it alphabetically in the dictionary.3 I began all this quite late at night and discovered that the method was rather time-consuming, so I went to bed with only the first two stanzas of the poem completed.

MWord

The next morning a second, faster method occurred to me. I realized that, rather than looking up each word in a dictionary, I could type one of Baudelaire’s poems—in French—into a word-processing program and using the “spell-check” feature allow the program to make English “suggestions” for each of the “misspelled” words. I could then choose to replace the French words with those suggested by the word processor. I selected Baudelaire’s “L’Aube Spirituelle” at random and typed it up using Microsoft Word v.3.0. I soon discovered, however, that when the program spell-checked the poem there were some French words for which the program wouldn’t offer an English suggestion. I went through the entire poem taking Word’s suggested substitutions whenever they were offered, but ended up with a series of lines written in both French and English. I translated the remaining French words directly into English using Larousse’s French-English/English-French Dictionary. The resulting lines were made up entirely of English words, but they lacked coherent syntax. At this point, in spite of my interest in using methods similar to this one as a way of getting away from the practices I’d employed as a poet up to that point, I didn’t feel completely satisfied with the result. My interest in having a strong hand in the poem and in narrative kept me from being content with the text as it stood.

Later I came to think of this text—seemingly unconnected English words—as my “base text.” I used this “base text” as a sort of framework for the resultant poem. This isn’t to say that I would use each word from each line of the base text in strict order, but rather that I allowed the words to suggest lines of the poem to me, although individual words from the base text were sometimes directly incorporated. In this way the word “mess” in line 11 of “L’Aube Spiritually” comes from spell-checking the French “mes,” whereas my use of “electrifying” was suggested by “voltage,” the spell-checker’s substitution for the French “voltige” in the original.

Much later, after I’d used this method a few times, I stopped using the French-English dictionary to translate words remaining in French after the spell-check was complete. Instead, I started translating these French words in a way which more closely resembled the As Understood and Free translation methods described below. After I’d written my first twenty translations I stopped using the MWord method much, though I did return to it from time to time when I needed to briefly change my practice.

Phonetic

For whatever reason, after writing “L’Aube Spiritually” I didn’t write another of these translations until late October of the same year. When I did decide to pick things up again I was nowhere near a computer. Since I couldn’t generate a base text using the familiar spell-check method, I chose to do so by trying to find English phonetic equivalents of Baudelaire’s French. Sounding out the words to “La Mort Des Amants” (which I’d again selected at random, of course4) I generated a base text of English words which, again, lacked any obvious syntax. I listened for English words in the sounds of individual words, strings of words, or any sequence of syllables in the words in Baudelaire’s lines. In this manner the beginning of the first line of “La Mort Des Amants,” “Nous aurons des lits…” was translated as “Noose orange delete.” Using these words as a jumping-off point, “An orange noose deleted…” became the beginning of the first line of “Law Morgue Days Almonds.”

As Understood

The next method that I came up with was far simpler than the previous two. I should back up a bit and say that when I began this project it had been about three years since my last French class. While my pronunciation might have been acceptable, there were large holes in my comprehension of French.5 In looking over several of Baudelaire’s poems however, I realized that I still understood a passable amount of what I was reading, and those words or phrases that I didn’t recognize were automatically assigned meanings, which they may or may not have had.6 Not unlike a poorly prepared student translating a passage he’s never seen before from French to English in an exam, I tried to make sense of the poems in front of me. Since I was trying to translate the phrases in their entirety, I didn’t need a base text to work from. At this point I was more interested in understanding the language in Baudelaire’s poems than just the individual, isolated words.

Word List

The fourth method I worked out was only used in two of my translations: “Ember” and “Checkroom.” I made three lists of words (one list each for nouns, verbs and adjectives) chosen at random from The Random House Collegiate Dictionary. Each list had twenty-six words that began with a different letter of the alphabet, making a table three columns wide and twenty-six rows long. Taking Baudelaire’s poems “Elevation” and “Causerie,” I replaced the French nouns, verbs and adjectives with nouns, verbs and adjectives from my word lists. I chose words that began with the letter corresponding with the 1st letter of each French word. So “Elevation” became “Ember,” because “Elevation” was a noun beginning with E, and “Ember” was the word in the noun column’s E row. Adverbs were mostly translated as adjectives; prepositions and conjunctions were translated literally; and articles were translated as I judged appropriate, because “la vie” could translate as “life” or “the life” in different contexts. While my adherence to use of punctuation had varied in methods employed prior to “Word List,” the punctuation in both “Ember” and “Checkroom” mimics that of Baudelaire’s originals, and there’s probably also a close adherence to the sentence structures of the originals, due to the very nature of such a one-to-one replacement.

Free7

If it’s not already evident—after my confessing that I decided to use a word processor to find my French words’ nearest neighbors rather than search for the space they would each occupy in a dictionary—let me say straight out that I can become somewhat impatient as a writer.8 I found that as I translated poems As Understood or used the base texts generated with MWord or the Phonetic method, I wanted to move a little more quickly through the poems. New words and lines were suggesting themselves to me based on the meanings, sounds, shapes, possible meanings, and associations with the language in the French originals. So the Free method was developed by allowing myself to make use of these “suggestions” in what I came to think of as a “rapid jumping-off from the text.” While the translations I had made As Understood were written based on my best understanding of the poems, the Free translations responded more to characteristics of Baudelaire’s writing which were less obvious or overt. For example, the title of the poem “The Auto Mechanics,” translated Free from “L’Héautontimorouménos,” may have arrived as a result of the presence of “auto” in the longer French word, the length of the word and the other letters in Baudelaire’s title word, or perhaps something I am unaware of, to which I was responding.

Since there is no grounding rule in the Free method, in the later translation work there was plenty of room to modify, respond or react both to modes of writing that I’d employed previously in the project and my experience of translating the poems. Free is the method used predominantly in Flowers of Bad, and there is no definitive version of it. Variations include Frigid, Frigidaire, Frozen, and Cracked. One poem was even translated using the Shazbot translation method. On the pages where I first wrote out my Free translations there are often notes like “What has Free become?” or “Free, but slowly,” or once or twice something like “Free-slurry.” There are probably numerous changes in my use of the Free method that could be noted if these translations were regarded chronologically, including breakdowns in syntax and in the one-to-one translation of words or images. Sometimes two or more meanings suggested themselves for lines or phrases in a poem, and rather than trying to figure out which of them was le mot juste, I would incorporate more than one, covering all my bets.

While it’s true that many of the methods that came later were developed as direct responses to ones that had preceded them, I think of the creation of the of the first six methods (the discarded first one with the dictionary, MWord, Phonetic, Word List, As Understood, Free) as evolving more than responding. I say this because the development of each came more out of working with the previous methods and seeing other routes or possibilities than out of reacting against them in frustration or trying to find some way to get around problems that I’d come up against. The Free method grew mostly out of translating Baudelaire’s poems As Understood, although the other five methods contributed something to my use of it I’m sure.

II. Later Methods

Collision & Directed

It has always seemed impossible to me to translate something without imposing some part of the translator’s own disposition. With this in mind, I decided that I wanted to intentionally choose a direction or attitude for a translation to adopt before I began composing it. The Collision method involved taking a poem of Baudelaire’s along with a second text, and translating the first either by using the second as a filter, or by smashing the two together during the translation.

Somewhat similarly, the Directed method became another way of imposing a leaning or a tendency on a translation. In a Directed translation everything is interpreted in terms of a particular focus. If this focus were, for example, the object of one’s affection or a particular political agenda then it would be as if it were known that Baudelaire’s poem was in fact about the object of one’s affection or the political agenda. Any further understanding of Baudelaire’s poem would reflect this fact and this premise would be demonstrated in the translation of Baudelaire’s poem.

Blind

At some point I decided that I’d translated enough of Baudelaire’s poems that I felt as though I knew what he was doing, and I felt as though I understood pretty much what I was doing, so why not simply cut out the middle man? For the Blind translations I approached Baudelaire’s poem knowing nothing more at first than the line count and the title. Once I had written my translation I checked it against Baudelaire’s original and any parts of the poem that had been translated incorrectly were then corrected. (Remarkably, the handful of times that I used this method I found that my translations were pretty much dead-on and required very little correction.)

Forced Sonnet

In order to explain the Forced Sonnet9 method, it may be easiest to first describe the form of the resulting poem. The Forced Sonnets were translated from sonnets of Baudelaire’s. The translations all had 14 lines, followed the same rhyme scheme and each line of the translation had the same number of syllables as the corresponding line in the French poem.

I would begin by taking a translation I had done of one of Baudelaire’s sonnets using any of the other methods I’ve described up to this point (let’s call this the old translation). Then from the beginning of the first line of my old translation, I counted out a number of syllables equal to the number of syllables in the first line of the original French poem, and struck out all words on the line that came after. The words that remained became the first line of the Forced Sonnet. I then followed the same procedure with the second line of my old translation as I had with the first to produce the second line of my Forced Sonnet.

Starting at the beginning of the third line of the old translation, I would look for a word which rhymed with what was now the last word of the first line of the Forced Sonnet. I then counted backwards from the rhyming word on the third line until I had reached a syllable count equal to the number of syllables in the third line of Baudelaire’s original. Only the syllables within that count made up the third line of the Forced Sonnet and I would strike out all others from the line. I then followed the same procedure to produce the fourth line as I had with the third, beginning by seeking a word in fourth line of the old translation which rhymed with the last word of the second line of the Forced Sonnet.

Following this procedure I would now have a four-line stanza of two rhyming couplets, A-B-A-B. From here I would go on to produce the remaining rhyming couplets of the Forced Sonnet (i.e., C-D-C-D E-E-F G-G-F). This is the basic method. However, there were a few contingencies I discovered I needed to plan for.

Let’s suppose that I found a word in the third line of the old translation which rhymed with the end word of the new first line of the Forced Sonnet. Now let’s suppose that counting backwards from that word in the old translation I arrived at the beginning of the line before I have matched the syllable count of the corresponding third line of Baudelaire’s poem. In this instance I would wrap my syllable count around to the end of the line, continuing to count backwards from the last word of the third line of the old translation. The last syllable in that count would become the beginning of the third line in the Forced Sonnet and the rhyming word—where we started our count—would become the end of the third line.

As an example, let’s say my first line of my Forced Sonnet ended with the word “these” and the third line of my old translation is “The batteries on the furnace climbing higher and higher until.” The first word in this line that rhymes with “these” is “batteries.” But if the third line in Baudelaire’s poem has thirteen syllables I’m out of luck, because counting backwards from “batteries” is only going to give me four syllables: “The batteries.” So I’ll get my remaining nine syllables by continuing to count backwards from “until,” the last word of the same line in the old translation. Counting backwards nine syllables I get “Climbing higher and higher until.” I’ll strike all remaining words or syllables from the line and put these nine syllables before my first four (still gotta have “batteries” at the end of the line to make the rhyme) and get as the third line of my Forced Sonnet:

Climbing higher and higher until the batteries

Now let’s suppose that there is no word in the third line of my old translation which rhymes with the end word of the first line of the Forced Sonnet I’m composing. In this case I would return to the first line of my old translation and rewrite it by starting the syllable count from the second word in the line. This should produce a different end-word for the first line of the Forced Sonnet. So then I would return to the third line of the old translation and try to find a rhyming match again. If again no rhyming match could be found, I would return to the first line of the old translation and begin my count with the third word, repeating the process until a match had been made.

Finally, it may have occurred to the reader that the odds are good that the syllable count might at some point fall in the middle of a word. I approached this issue both possible ways, by composing Forced Sonnets that included portions of words and by extending the syllable count in order to accommodate entire words. However, I never used both approaches in any one Forced Sonnet.

The Two Good Sisters

The Two Good Sisters method gets its name from both the title of the poem this method was first used with (“Les Deux Bonnes Sœurs”) and because the lines of a poem translated this way are separated in the middle by a short gap, creating a poem that may look as though it’s made up of two distinct but related parts, one right next to the other.

In employing The Two Good Sisters, I would take a rectangular and opaque object (i.e., a magazine or a book) and lay it over a poem of Baudelaire’s so that the object’s leftmost edge ran vertically down the center of the poem, covering up the right half of the poem from top to bottom. I then translated (using any of my other methods) only what remained uncovered, including those words that were only partially visible. Once the entire first half of every line in the poem had been translated this way, I covered only the left half of the poem and translated the right-hand part of the poem which was now visible.

From there, I lined the two halves of the poem up alongside one another with a gap of about five em spaces. With one or two of the translations I composed using The Two Good Sisters I merged the two halves together by removing the gap so they had the appearance of being made up of unbroken lines. In other instances I attempted to resolve the two mismatched halves of the lines so that they seemed to make more sense narratively; in others I didn’t, allowing them to make their own sense.

Another variation of this form worth mentioning is The One Blind Sister, where one half of the poem was translated using The Two Good Sisters method and the other was translated using the Blind method (as explained above).

Exclusion

Somewhat similar in appearance, but not to be mistaken for The Two Good Sisters is the Exclusion method. The two might easily be mistaken because of a similarity in their appearances: both may include a visible split in the poem’s lines.

The Exclusion method was accomplished in two stages. In the first stage of the translation process, I allowed myself not to feel bound to making use of all aspects of Baudelaire’s original poem. I took instead whichever parts of the lines I wanted and disregarded the rest. I tried, however, to insure that the result of this first stage would be a poem which would cohere narratively as the reader read in normal fashion, left to right, top to bottom. In the second stage of the Exclusion method I returned to the beginning of Baudelaire’s poem and wrote separate translations of the portions of the lines I’d excluded in the first stage, without trying to force the translated portions to reflect or cohere with any other part of the poem. Once the excluded portions had all been translated, I placed them next to the corresponding lines of the first part of the translation in italics, enclosed within parentheses.

Swimming

This may be the most difficult of the methods to describe exactly or specifically. I called the method Swimming because this is how I thought of it at the time: as swimming on the surface of the poem. Generally I would write out in French one of Baudelaire’s poems by hand, in blocks of about four to six lines. Then, using a different color ink, above or below the copied lines, I would write lines which somehow captured the mood of the French, while paying as little direct attention as I could to those qualities of the language that I had paid attention to in earlier methods (meanings, sounds, shapes, etc.). I repeated this process until all the lines from Baudelaire’s poem had been written out in French and translated in order.

Anagrammatic

I had intended for the Anagrammatic translations to be the last method I employed. By the time I reached the point where there were only five untranslated poems I had developed many feelings about the practice and process of translating, and about what I had and had not been able to accomplish during the long project of working with Les Fleurs Du Mal. I regretted that in my translations so many things had been added and so many things lost. I wanted somehow to make use of all of a poem without losing or adding anything.

The closest that I came to this ideal may be in the Anagrammatic translations (there are 4), as every letter that appears in the original French poem also appears in the translation. No letters were added. These translations have titles which are anagrams of the French originals’ and every poem is a line-by-line anagram of its French counterpart. I didn’t retain any of the accents or cedillas, and letters such as œ were converted into o and e, but with these exceptions each line in the translation contains the same letters as the original.

The first poem I translated using the Anagrammatic method used a variant that clearly follows the toughest set of restrictions, bordering on the Oulipian.10 In “A.M. Sequel,” not only is every line, dedication and epigram anagrammatic of the original, but the poem is made up of complete sentences which follow the rules of English grammar (although there continues to be some debate between my copy-editor mother and myself as to whether a single noun can be modified by two verbs without a conjunction). All of the Anagrammatic translations were written by laying out letters from the lines of one of Baudelaire’s poems using the tiles from two complete Scrabble™ sets and then rearranging them. I did this steadily for about three and a half months in order to write “A.M. Sequel,” and then swore I would never take up this particular variation of the method again.

As I’ve just written, when I began the Anagrammatic poems I had many complex feelings about translating and more specifically about translating Baudelaire. I also felt that composing false translations had often been a way of finding entry into a poem from which I was otherwise excluded. From time to time, however, I no longer wanted so much to find a way into the poems as to shatter them with a hammer. Though I tried to figure out just how this could be accomplished (“1. Write poem out on a sheet of glass. 2. Apply hammer as needed.”, etc.) I never fully succeeded. I do think, however, that the remaining three Anagrammatic translations (“Hep Slears,” “XLII” & “Er Irbralaple”) come closest to accomplishing this out of all the translations that I’ve done.11

Re-translation

There at the last though, I found that there were a few poems that I wanted to re-translate, although I found the methods that I’d used up to that point unworkable, perhaps because I was quite ready to be finished with the project. I tried working with the texts as they were, colliding them with alternate translations of the same poem, extracting words, etc. The results, however, were not terribly satisfying. Ultimately I ended up re-translating them, but without referring again to Baudelaire’s original. Two of these (there were three, I believe) were translated from English into English, using a method which probably owes something to the Swimming method. The third of these Re-translations I translated back into French. Having read all of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal in one fashion or another, I had picked up or remembered a bit more French than I started with. If nothing else I might say that I felt a certain familiarity with the language, even if I wouldn’t be able to share that familiarity with anyone else by engaging them in a conversation.12 I decided that I would do my best to restore one of Baudelaire’s poems by re-translating it from English back into French in a way which may serve as the obverse of the As Understood method.

III. A Final Note On The Forms Of These Poems

With few exceptions I have managed from the beginning to retain several aspects of Baudelaire’s form in each of these poems. Firstly, almost every line in this collection begins with an initial cap, as do the lines in the edition of Les Fleurs du Mal that I have used throughout the process. For the most part I have also followed Baudelaire’s line breaks and stanza length. His sonnets remain sonnets here, at least in as much as they are fourteen-line poems in two four-line stanzas followed by two three-line stanzas.13 While all these poems were translated as whole and complete poems, the translations were done line by line, and the translated aspects or words from one line do not wrap around and appear on another that follows it. There are also those poems that retain the rhyme schemes of the originals, including some that are not Forced Sonnets.

In March of 1991, almost two weeks after I’d written “The Fin of the Journey,” the last poem in the first sequence of twenty poems from this series which would later be published as Flurries of Mail, a copy of French Sonnets that Jackson had sent arrived in the mail.


David Cameron
Toronto, Ontario
December 22, 2001

Footnotes

  1. The title of Words nd Ends from Ez, for example, mimics something of the appearance of the lines of the poems included in that collection where Jackson “systematically brought intoWords nd Ends from Ezletter strings consisting of single words and/or ends of words [fromThe Cantos] that successively ‘spell out’ Ezra Pound’s first and last name ‘diastically,’ i.e., strings in which the letters of Pound’s first and last names occupy places corresponding to those they fill in the names.” [Words nd Ends from Ez, p. 89]

  2. The only other all-French book of poems that I had in my apartment at the time was Jacques Prevert’s Paroles. I imagine that this would now be a very different collection if I’d chosen to make use of it rather than Les Fleurs du Mal. You might very well be holding a book right now entitled Parolees or Pay Roll instead.

  3. Which leaves us with the mystery of Serpent, which would seem to be a French word which hasn’t changed its spelling. Sixteen years later I seem to have lost track of my copy of The Random House Collegiate Dictionary, so I’m unable to refer back to exactly what it said. However, other dictionaries that I have in my possession at present indicate that “serpent” is Middle English in origin, and this may be why I chose to keep it in. Or maybe I ignored my rule or hadn’t come up with it before I started out writing the translation but found a need to apply it later on so developed it on-the-fly. Christ, it was only eight lines I got through that night. In any event I was probably quite tired and should be cut a small measure of slack for that reason if no other.

  4. Of course, choosing a poem “at random” usually meant opening the book somewhere near the middle and using whichever poem was on the right hand page, so long as it wasn’t too lengthy for however much time I wanted to spend writing right then.

  5. Maybe it would be good to include some note about how much French I speak now or had studied up to that point. I had taken about three years of French in high school, and was pretty fanatical about it. I loved studying French, and did very well with it. When I got to college I continued my studies, beginning with a French intensive class and then two more classes over the next two terms, the last one being a class in French phonetics and pronunciation. I left the university I was attending after that third term, largely because the academic mood was somewhat lacking there and my performance academically had begun to slip at the end of my first year. I didn’t fail anything, but my studies of French weren’t really proceeding with the same vigor that they had when I was in high school. After I got to Binghamton, where I later studied with Jackson, I really didn’t feel much like continuing with my French studies. Just before I met Jackson, I had taken a term and a half of introductory Spanish, taken largely because I wanted to be able to better hear the language in Federico Garcia Lorca’s poems. As much as I may have wanted to return to my studies of French once I’d begun this project, I felt as though I shouldn’t try to learn any more French as it would make the process of translating, especially with the As Understood and Free methods, that much more difficult. I have only ever read one paragraph of a quotation of Baudelaire’s in translation. I have a good understanding of French grammar and at least a fair understanding of the phonetics (although I might not be able to get my tongue to work out all pronunciations as I would like it to). What is probably most lacking is my vocabulary. A somewhat more concrete example of how lacking or not my French is might be found in the poem “Blanche.”

  6. In explaining this process to people since, I’ve pointed out that this is the sort of thing that goes on all the time. I think that when people encounter language they don’t understand they automatically make some sense of it, even if they write these interpretations off because they don’t match the rest of their understanding.

  7. How shall I explain the Free method now as I hurtle towards Toronto in a train to visit my grandmother just before Christmas? Canada’s a strange place, where most of the product packaging (if not all, I haven’t inspected it all yet) is written out in both French and English. My earliest desires to study French arose out of a frustration with this country, where left to my own devices while the adults busied themselves with adult matters (all that talking!) I was allowed to sit down in my grandmother’s study and watch television. Is there some sort of metaphor for the Free process or for all of false translation in the fact that across North America it seems that the major television stations broadcast much of the same programming but at different times and on differently numbered channels? My grandmother’s house possessed a strange device known as a cable box. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen one outside of Canada like it. It was a small box, covered with buttons, each designated with a number and a few letters, probably including ABC, NBC and PBS, but all with the numbers wrong. Since all the stations were wrong, were not where they should have been, I had to punch through this series of buttons trying to uncover the code that would show me the sort of programming I most desired: cartoons. Because of the fervor with which I searched, I don’t think that it took too very long to locate a channel showing cartoons, but my discovery was accompanied by a powerful frustration. The cartoons were entirely in French. Bugs and Elmer were speaking, but the words that came out of their mouths were entirely incomprehensible to me. At that point I became determined to learn to speak French, so I could return to Toronto and understand the French cartoons.

    So it would be possible, I suppose, to argue that the origins of these false translations comes earlier than when I received Jackson’s post card. Fairly late into the project I began to see one possible way of interpreting this project as a struggle to find a way into a text from which I was otherwise excluded. Often enough, this is why I had to switch up or modify my methods, or develop new ones. After working with a method for a while I would find myself stalling out, I would worry that I was falling back on tricks or ways that I already knew would work, and the poems would no longer surprise me in the way that I wanted them to. I am reminded here, oddly enough, of the Star Trek villains The Borg, who could be hit by the Enterprise’s phaser blasts, but only for a couple of shots, at which point their shields adapted, and the phasers would no longer be useful. So the crew of the Enterprise found that they had to continually change the modulation of their phasers so that they would be able to fight off the Borg and resist being assimilated into their “collective,” an organization that thought with one mind, acted as one entity, had only one understanding. Although I wonder if this contradicts a statement by Walt Whitman that I’ve often also associated with these poems “The job of the poet to resolve all tongues into his own.” Though that’s “resolve,” and not “assimilate.”

  8. Although the three and a half months it took to write the Anagrammatic “A.M. Sequel” might seem to contradict that.

  9. This description assumes an A-B-A-B first stanza. It should be modified for other Sonnet forms.

  10. It’s ridiculous to assume that I’m going to be able to explain to you in full what the Oulipo is or what I mean by Oulipian here, so let’s abandon that as the goal of this footnote. Rather I’ll refer you to a few other people’s words on the subject. In The Oulipo and Combinatorial Art (1991) Jacques Roubaud explains that the Oulipo is a group whose name derives from their “initial, inaugural name: Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle” (Workshop for Potential Literature). He further goes on to explain that “The aim of Oulipo is to invent (or reinvent) restrictions of a formal nature and propose them to enthusiasts interested in composing literature.” Raymond Queneau’s definition is my favorite: “Oulipians: rats who build the labyrinth form which they plan to escape.” In short, when I say “borders on the Oulipian” I mean that the form I was using had several rigid constraints which affected the resulting poem. In truth my constraints were more restrictive I believe than many of the methods created by the Oulipians, though certainly not as restrictive as some.La Disparition is a 300 page novel, written in 1969 by Georges Perec, entirely without the letter e. Its translation into English by Gilbert Adair, also entirely without the letter e, is entitled A Void.

    I first encountered the Oulipo around 1999, when Harry Matthews came to read at the St. Marks Poetry Project in New York shortly after the publication of Oulipo Compendium. I later wrote Mr. Matthews trying to learn whether my Anagramatic method had already been developed by any members of the Oulipo. He assured me that it had not.

  11. Ironically this is done without losing any of the “shards” or “fragments” of the original.

  12. I have been asked to include the following tale as an example of how well I actually speak French:

    Some years ago, on my first visit to France I went to Avignon in the South. While walking across a bridge that spanned the Rhône and a small park on one bank I was distracted by a group of older men and women playing boules on the grass below. With my head turned to the side and not watching where I was going I walked straight into a lamppost and banged my head so hard that it made a loud “bong!” sound against the metal pole, not unlike the sound of a medium-sized bell being struck. When I recovered from the collision I could see that all the people down in the park below me had paused in their game and were now looking straight up at me, trying to determine what had caused the noise.

    Of course I knew that I was going to get a large bump on my head and thought that as self-conscious as I was being an American travelling alone in France, being an American travelling alone in France with a large egg-shaped protrusion on one side of his head would be far worse. I determined immediately that I needed to remedy the situation and set out in search of a bar.

    It was late afternoon and fortunately there was one open just past the end of the bridge. I walked in and got the attention of the bartender and he came over, staring fixedly at my growing lump. Now that I had his attention I asked him (in French) “Can I have some ice cream? I’ve just kicked myself in the head with a lamppost.”

  13. There are a couple of exceptions to this “sonnet rule” which were translated in reverse, from the bottom up, so the line order in those stanzas runs three-three-four-four, or where the line order within each stanza remains the same but where the order of the stanzas is reversed.