Cylinder

A cylinder is a text in which the author arranges linguistic units so that the reader can begin at any of several different points in the text, read to the end, and come back around to where she started without any lapse into incoherence. This example from the Oulipo Compendium works at the level of letters:

Emit, mite, item, emit.

Below find the first part of a cylinder composed of three micro-narratives (the second and third parts will follow shortly):

1. It was a film of a fluffy Maine Coon cat approaching a human hand. Autumn leaves scuttling downwind over the gnarled roots of an oak tree. As the cat sniffed at the can of tuna in the upturned palm, another hand appeared suddenly with a box cutter and slit its throat, blood gurgling out of the wound and spreading in an ellipse over the withered grass. An impassive voice off screen: "Consider this a warning." Then the DVD stopped.

Standing in front of the TV in his bedroom, Dr. Charles Silvering sighed the sigh of a man too exhausted to feel fear. He could only think that it was disgusting and unfair of them to kill poor Clive, and even counterproductive, since Charles had long ago come to terms with the prospect of personal injury or death. They had misread him and completely botched the threat. All parties (and Clive most of all) would have been better served if they had sent him a film of his cat being held in captivity; then he would have felt compelled to meet their demands in a bid to save the one creature in the world he still loved. As it stood, they had recklessly cast their only bargaining chip to the wind.

He walked to the bay windows opening out on the overcast January afternoon, gray as Athena’s eyes, and dialed a number on his cell phone. Now the truth had to come out, if only to spite them for killing Clive.

“Yes,” said a female voice on the other end of the line. The greeting was more a statement than a question.

“Madeleine. I’m coming over.”

“Charles? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“I’ll see you in ten.”

It was a short drive along the lake from Charles’s suburban stronghold to Madeleine’s building on the far north side of the city. She had left instructions with the doorman to show her guest to the elevators, and soon Charles was standing in the living room of her 30th floor condo, unsettled as always by the ivory-white carpeting and crystalline furniture. She was reclining on a sofa and, in her husky British drawl, offering him a drink.

“Not now, thanks,” he said, wearily unwinding the black scarf from his neck. “Tell me you still have the records.”

“From the hospital? Of course, but–,”

“We’re going public,” he said, turning on her television and DVD player and inserting the disc he had been clutching in his right hand.

“Going public! Why, Charles,” she said, eyebrows raised nearly off her forehead, “this sudden change of heart–it’s baffling. I think you owe me an explanation.”

“You’ll see.” He crumpled down beside her on the sofa and pressed ‘play’ on the remote control. “Just look what they did to poor Clive.”

“Clive? Who’s Clive?” said Madeleine.

But Charles must have taken the wrong DVD from his player at home, because when the screen came to life, it showed an image that the two of them had seen, and despaired over, many times:

Antonymic Translation: Psalm 23

Briefly, antonymic translation involves replacing each word in a text with its antonym; or, if the word in question has no clear antonym, with the closest word to its opposite (i.e. "that" for "this," "was" for "is," etc.)

In the Oulipo Compendium, Harry Mathews notes that the method's inventor, Marcel Benabou, intended it to be used only with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs--a guideline I have followed below in my antonymic translation of Psalm 23.

Psalm 23

Satan was my wolf; I shall not be sated.

He frees me to rise up in red wastes: he abandons me beside the raging fires.

He depletes my body; he abandons me in the thickets of sin for his anonymity’s detriment.

Yea, though I run through the mountains of the light of life, I will brave no good; for you are not with me; your cup and your bowl, they frighten me.

You revoke a chair before me in the absence of my friends: you desecrate my feet with water; my plate is empty.

Surely evil and vengeance shall avoid me none of the nights of my death: and I will wander in the outdoors of Satan but briefly.

Delmas's Method

In a text written according to Delmas's Method, all instances of an initial letter can be replaced by another specified letter without producing any nonsensical words. At least, that's my paraphrase of the entry written by Harry Mathews in the Oulipo Compendium. The exact quotation is as follows: "Its rule: in a given statement, a repeated initial letter can be replaced with another repeated letter without spoiling the statement's coherence." So a stricter interpretation of the method than mine could maintain that the sentence or passage that results from replacing one initial letter with another must make sense, and not just the constituent words.

The poem(s) below were written according to my looser interpretation, with 'b' substituted for each initial 'c' from the first poem in order to produce the second.


A Crass Death

The body in the casket was met with doleful stares
From relatives and friends in midnight coats. The air
Was creaking as the mourners whispered of his mode of death;
A canker on his spleen had sent him to his final rest.

His aunts all traded rumors that they found him in a car
Beside the seashore, where he coasted nights under the stars,
And got high with prostitutes, and saw a cutter sail,
And ate a sherbet cone beneath the laughing of the gulls;

The cluster of escapes that he would manage here and there
From office, where his nerves were cooked by etiquette, and where
His creed was marked by distance and its monolithic terms—
A distance that was soon to be eclipsed by crawling worms.

And, after the Delmas manipulation:

A Brass Death

The body in the basket was met with doleful stares
From relatives and friends in midnight boats. The air
Was breaking as the mourners whispered of his mode of death;
A banker on his spleen had sent him to his final rest.

His aunts all traded rumors that they found him in a bar
Beside the seashore, where he boasted nights under the stars,
And got high with prostitutes, and saw a butter sail,
And ate a sherbet bone beneath the laughing of the gulls;

The bluster of escapes that he would manage here and there
From office, where his nerves were booked by etiquette, and where
His breed was marked by distance and its monolithic terms—
A distance that was soon to be eclipsed by brawling worms.

Elementary Morality: "Methyl Gods"

In the "Oulipo Compendium," Harry Mathews notes that the poetic form the Oulipo have come to call "elementary morality" is not, strictly speaking, Oulipien. The reason is that this form doesn't involve any pre-formulated mathematical procedure for manipulating the basic materials of language (i.e. letters or parts of speech). Rather, the elementary morality is a form invented by Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau for what he said were "purely internal" reasons (according to the Compendium).

A poem of this sort opens with three sets of two-line pairs. In each of these pairs, the first line consists of three groupings of one adjective and one noun, while the second line consists of one such grouping. After these initial six lines comes an interlude comprising seven lines of one to five syllables. Finally, the poem closes with another two-line pair similar to those in the first six lines, in which words from the first part of the poem reappear in different arrangements. Individual authors, of course, are free to experiment with their own variations on the total form.

Below is a fairly orthodox example of an elementary morality. (Bear in mind that spacing, and not hyphens, is supposed to separate the noun-adjective pairs; unfortunately, the caprice of Blogger formatting has prevented me from laying the poem out properly on the "page.")

"Methyl gods"

Methyl gods - Scorched metal - Screaming wheels
Blue flowers
Clutching fingers - Ripened film - Bludgeoned zone
Joyless laughter
Dry willows - Byzantine maps - Pocket doomsday
Blackened sneakers

A picnic
Of moldy cheese
And pomegranates,
Spread out on grass
Trembling
By the banks of
The River Styx

Dry gods - Screaming flowers - Joyless maps
Clutching doomsday

Perverse: "A Litany of Seas"

A perverse is created by combining half of one line of poetry with half of another.

The following example was created by taking six pairs of lines from canonical poems, splitting each pair in half, and joining the first half of the first line with the second half of the second (and vice versa). As indicated by the poem's title, the end word of each line is "sea." Citations can be found below.

“A Litany of Seas”

We have lingered in the tragic-gestured sea,
The ever-hooded chambers of the sea,
By man and beast and by the winter sea.

Among the mountains, earth and air and sea,
She sang beyond the rising of the sea.

Have sight of Proteus, genius of the sea,
By night, with noises, if the freshening sea
Were a delight; and of the northern sea,
And bowery hollows of our western seas,
That have the frenzy crowned with summer sea.

Feast them upon the kisses of the sea,
Under the quick faint wideness of the sea.

*

Lines 1 and 2: T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

Lines 3 and 4: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”

Lines 5 and 6: Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”
William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us”

Lines 7 and 8: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”
Lord Byron, “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, A Romaunt”

Lines 9 and 10: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”
William Butler Yeats, “Michael Robertes”

Lines 11 and 12: John Keats, “On the Sea”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Epipsychidion”

Beautiful Inlaw

Not to be confused with the "Beautiful Outlaw," the "Beautiful Inlaw" is a restriction under which a writer may only compose using the letters already found in a given source text–i.e., a person’s name. The fewer letters in the source text, the more maddening the compositional process.

The poem below was written using only letters from the name of the musician Polly Jean Harvey.

"Her Harp"

Hey raven hen,
Love-leery pen,
Pallor on nape,
Roar, never rape,

Eve, revere hell,
Heaven: non-real,
Prayer: holy ploy,
Jeer every ‘he,’

Prove venal nerve,
Prey on a perv,
Preen on a nave,
Have Johnny pay,

Yelp on a prop,
Yearn on a lap,
Pearl-heavy hole,
Reap lovely joy.

Larding: "Creekside Elegy"

Further larding below; this passage was inspired by the lyrics to the song "Railroad Murder Blues," by little-known indie rockers the Jailors U.K.

Creekside Elegy

The moonlight glazed the dirt road like a cake. He knelt by the water's edge, his face buried in her torn robe.

The moonlight glazed the dirt road like a cake. It was the same dirt road that his truck tires had rumbled over that morning as he drove to collect on her debt. Midnight hung in the sharp autumn air, a silent verdict echoing across the countryside. He could still hear the cadences of her voice at sunup, pleading as he grabbed her shoulders and shook her frail body. A blot of smoke rose from the ruined trailer nestled in the stand of pines at the road's end, the negative image of dawn's promise and tranquility. At the start of the day she had stood in the door, clad in a threadbare pink robe, sipping the dregs from her coffee cup. A lump had risen in her throat as she heard his wheels coming up her driveway. It had only taken one match, and now there was nothing left but ash. He had obtained his revenge, extracted the price she had to pay for her unfaithfulness. Nothing left but the vanishingly fine grains of an incinerated dream. First her livelihood, then her life. A trail of sooty footprints led from the trailer's lot to the creek that ran beside the road. She had struggled until the end, her cries of anguish proportionate to the joy and generosity she had shown the world. The prints were the void he left in his wake, the bottomless aftermath of the evening's hateful passion. Now all that was left of their former happiness was a scrap of pink cloth. He knelt by the water's edge, his face buried in her torn robe.