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Eunoia

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I was prompted to buy a copy of Eunoia after hearing Christian Bok reading excerpts on the radio. I devoured the book in one sitting, turning each page with greater anticipation, relishing each example of verbal ingenuity. To me, that's what Eunoia is essentially about - sheer brilliance. This book is the result of a titanic cerebral initiative and it comes off flawlessly.

I've lent this book to dozens of people, and to be honest, not everyone has appreciated it in the same way I have. Some people have read the first page and handed it back saying "I don't get it" or "it makes my head hurt". Clearly, this book is not for everyone.

If you have a passion for language you will love this book. If you like word-play, you will love this book. If you appreciate "cleverness" you will love this book. I smiled the whole way through it out of sheer amazement and disbelief. By far the best thing I've read this year, and something that I will continue to revisit over the years to come.

Christian Bök's Eunoia is becoming a fast hit among those with actual "colored-letter" synesthesia.

Christian Bök based part of his ideas for Eunoia off the concept of synesthesia, mainly borrowing from Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Voyelles" (the strangely-colored cover design for the book is also based upon the same). In "Voyelles", Rimbaud creates correspondences between colors and letters of the alphabet (or, more specifically, the written symbols - the graphemes) for vowels.

Synesthesia is an actually existing, albeit rare, set of benign neurological conditions. Overwhelmingly, the most common (perhaps as common as existing in 1 out of every 750 people) form of synesthesia involves involuntary, automatic correspondences made between colors and graphemes (letter and number characters). This type of synesthesia is apparently genetically-based (that is, organic, and not psychologically based upon childhood associations), and usually emerges around the age of six or seven years of age. Those with "colored-letter" synesthesia generally maintain it throughout life, with virtually no variations in the color-letter correspondences. They have no choice as to which colors are associated with which letters and are stuck with the links throughout life. Also, each individual synesthete's total set of color-letter correspondences is unique, although there are certain trends to be found world-wide with certain graphemes, such as "A" being red and "O" being white or clear amongst about two-thirds of all such synesthetes.

Rimbaud was not a colored-letter synesthete; he admits that he made up the correspondences in his (in-)famous poem.

However, now, true colored-letter synesthetes are finding Bök's book either an overwhelming thrill or nightmare. To those without this form of synesthesia, the pages of Bök's book - each page using one and only one vowel for all words - glare with the profusion of the particular vowel. For the actual colored-letter synesthete, each particular page tends to totally overwhelm with a particular color. I have received letters from synesthetes writing in rapturous awe of how a certain chapter of Eunoia sweep them with the "icy whiteness of O", or how it is a nightmare with simply too much red "A" (even though, to Rimbaud, "A" was supposed to be black) distracting from everything else.

Sean A. Day, President, American Synesthesia Association

As its author weaves his stories out of single vowels, Eunoia is imminently delightful but also rapidly tiring and gimmicky. It is more of a curiosity than a readable work. Its novelty wears thin after a few minutes, and while this oeuvre never strays from being a remarkable undertaking, my practical side also questions whether the effort on its creator's part was worth the finished product. Perhaps the biggest surprise to come from Eunoia was the sheer difficulty in reading through it. I found myself backing up and re-reading sentences for content, something I haven't done as often since elementary school. How nostalgic, huh? Eunoia is a curiosity but little more. I salute Christian Bok for his labor of love (or was it a labor of madness?) but I can't see Eunoia as a work of genius, merely a work composed of....a lot of work.

That said, my five-minute poem of tribute to Bok:


Alas, all day a lad's art lacks a fan's handclap and

Enters the sleep these restless westerners she reveres here need---

I find it icky, writings in

Worn schoolbooks, known to hold good old story of:

Sunup! Such rush! Such hum! Tumult! Thus lush church kudzu unfurls, gulls hunt, pluck bug-guts. Bugs burst, succumb!


Now imagine page after page of this, only better-written, and you got Eunoia.

Christian Bok's Eunoia is not only brilliant, but it's very funny and reads quickly. I just wanted to add to the previous review that Eunoia recently won the Griffin Poetry Prize. It's been a best-seller in Canada for awhile. More on the Griffin prize can be found [on the web]
it's the most prestigious Canadian award for poetry. If you like other OULIPO authors, Dr. Seuss & othre funny crazy stuff (tho not for the kids), sound poetry, innovative poetry, etc. you'll like this book. Check out other things Coach House has to offer, too. They're a smallish press but they publish amazing stuff. Also if you like Eunoia you should try Christian's other book, Crystallography. It's more visually oriented than Eunoia but just as enjoyable.

I substituted at a middle school a little while ago, and the teacher had left a lesson that involved reading and discussing a poem (it was "The First Book", by Rita Dove: Selected Poems) and then writing a "found poem", based on words that the students found around the room. I knew that I would have to sell it well for the lesson to have any chance. After we established, with only little confusion and resistance, the poem's message, I steered the discussion to the poem's poetic qualities. I tried to emphasize what made the poem a poem, which is hard sometimes when so much that is called "poetry" is simple fancy prose with irregular line breaks. So we talked about image, figurative language and double meanings, and I suggested, as I suggest with every class on the subject, that poetry is essentially playing with language.

(I had had difficulty with a previous definition that had confounded a class of sophomores, that poetry "is words doing more that just meaning what they mean." Try as they might some students couldn't repeat that sentence back to me. One was convinced that I had said that poetry "doesn't mean anything".)

When it came time for the assignment to write a "found poem", I anticipated some resistance. They would certainly ask why they couldn't just write about anything they wanted. So I told them about Christian Bök, and I reminded them about "playing with language". Christian Bök wrote the book Eunoia, in which each of five chapters uses only one vowel, each in turn. The first page goes thus:

Awkward grammar appalls a craftsman. A Dada bard
as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an
alpha (a splapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars
all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A
madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh -- a hand-
stamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a
mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that
charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark
saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all
annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and
Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fatwa bans
all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.

In addition to that constraint, Bök requires that each chapter must refer to writing, a banquet, a "prurient debauch", a "pastoral tableau", and a "nautical voyage". Each must "accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism", exhaust as much of the available lexicon as possible with minimal repetition, and avoid the letter y. To top it off, the E chapter is a retelling of the Iliad: The Iliad (Penguin Classics).

The effect is fascinating. Far from limiting interest, Bök's syntactic limits heighten our fascination. We wonder how he will pull it off, and what the result will be. Furthermore, Bök does not ignore the importance of sound. Although he does indeed accent internal rhyme, the fact of the vowels themselves creates a distinct articulatory mood in each chapter. One would never think that somehow the letter u was so linked to the letter s in the English language, but try reading this out loud. The combination creates a phonetic pattern that reminds me somehow of a washing machine:


Kultur spurns Ubu - thus Ubu pulls stunts. Ubu shuns
Skulptur: Uruk urns (plus busts), Zulu jugs (plus
tusks). Ubu sculpts junk für Kunst und Glück. Ubu
busks. Ubu drums drums, plus Ubu strums cruths
(such hubbub, such ruckus): thump, thump; thrum,
thrum. Ubu puns puns. Ubu blurts untruth: much
bunkum (plus bull), much humbug (plus bunk) - but
trustful schmucks trust such untruthful stuff; thus
Ubu (cult guru) must bluff dumbstruck numbskulls
(such chumps). Ubu mulcts surplus funds (trust
funds plus slush funds). Ubu usurps much usufruct.
Ubu sums up lump sums. Ubu trumps dumb luck.

So, back to the middle school class. I asked who liked to do puzzles, and got a few hands. Some mentioned sudoku or crossword puzzles. I told them that what they were about to do was much the same thing, and much the same as Christian Bök had done: they were going to try to solve a puzzle and write a poem. They were going to play with words.

They had five minutes to look around the room and write down any word they saw. I encouraged them to plan ahead, and consider what words might be useful. After that, they were limited to what they had written down (after the time expired, a few students who had been watching their peers run around the classroom and write down words found themselves in a bind because they "didn't realize that they were supposed to write down words"; this was middle school, after all). Once seated, many found that they couldn't write a "poem" with the words they had. It turned out that they were defining a poem as "something about how you feel, or about love or something." I encouraged them to remember the sole criterion: playing with language. In the end, few students got beyond a sentence. One came up with something quite interesting, because she hadn't bound herself, as most had for some reason, to using each word only once. The repetition and inversion she employed was actually pretty novel and engaging. One small boy was very excited to read his poem to me--a freestyle rap the length of the page. He was disappointed to find out that that wasn't what he was actually supposed to be writing, but hey, at least he was writing.

The innovation of new restrictions purely for their own sake, or if you would rather, for the sake of pushing poetic innovation to its limits, intrigues me. Writing in a form often feels much like doing a sudoku puzzle or a crossword, and is satisfying for the same reason, with the added result of--hopefully--a new image, phrase or idea that never would have been arrived at without the self-imposed restriction. I sometimes wonder what extremes could be attempted, like alpinists who having heard of a climber summiting Mt. Everest without oxygen bottles, feels the need to do the same backwards on a pogo stick. What if you wrote a poem using only adjectives? Or a sonnet in which each line could only have a specific number of words? Or a poem in which reduced its available letters by one every line? Or all of the above.

John Fuller did something interesting along these lines. In response to a contest to write a poem using only three-letter words, Fuller decided to also write only in lines of three words and stanzas of three lines. Here is the result:

"The Kiss"

Who are you
You who may
Die one day?

Who saw the
Fat bee and
The owl fly

And the sad
Ivy put out
One sly arm?

Not the eye
Nor the ear
Can say Yes:

One eye has
Its lid and
Can get shy;

One ear can
Run out and
Off the map.

One eye can
Aim too low
And not hit;

One ear can
Hug the air,
Get too hot.

But lip and
Red lip are
Two and two,

His lip and
Her lip mix
And are wed,

Lip and lip
Can now say:
"You may die

But not yet.
Yes you die
But not yet."

The old lie.

Critic Jonathan Barker calls it a "metric invention in search of a subject". Poet James Fenton calls it "extremely beautiful". I would simply like to insist that a beautiful metric invention is in no way an oxymoron. And what do you know--Fuller's poem is even "about love or something", as the middle schoolers would have it.

Note: John Fullers Collect Works from Chatto and Windus is not available from Amazon. I found "The Kiss" in this book by James Fenton: An Introduction to English Poetry.

Zach Hudson
[...]

This put poetry back in the public eye in Canada, which is nearly a miracle. It demonstrates that a brainy game with language can be amusing to lots of people.

Eunoia is an amazing book - it is, to my mind, a book of poems in that the beauty of language is the focus more than the story.

The first five chapters are each dedicated to a vowel (in alphabetical order), and each chapter only contains words containing that voewl and no other. What is more, the author has constrained the stories in other ways and used the majority of all words that he could use in the writing.

After these five chapters there are other random experiments in language, such as the poem written only with the letters in the word "vowels".

I am very glad I read this book. It was an amazing feat of language that took the author 7 years to write (and the only surprise was that he could complete it at all). On the downside it is not an easy read! The constraints of the book make the language hard going. There were words there I had to look up (and I generally don't have that problem).

The mixture of words that in other works would be clearly pretentious with occasional gutter language also felt odd. Particularly in the "u" chapter, I was both impressed and dissapointed that the writer could describe sexual intercourse using just words with the "u" vowel - but imaginations will not run far as to which words he used. That rather sullied the beauty of the book in my opinion.

Hard going it might be, but this was not a long book and it was very much worth the read. Anyone who loves language cannot help but be impressed by what is achieved here.

People say this book is a mere literary exercise. I found it profoundly beautiful and moving. It takes the language by the scruff of the vowels and wrings from it melodies and images most poets could not have begun to imagine. Having read it through, twice, I keep it by my bedside and sip from it constantly.

Amazing Bok, clever delightful Eunoia father, great hero in jazzy knowing lexolatry... I could go on.

Words, words, words - lots of words to wow, or shock, folk from Profs to Goths. Words from bottommost to zoomorph. Toronto-born Bök's book works!

"Christian Bök is the drug fetus's hypertextual brain engine." - Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric