So I read the inside cover of Sleeping with the Dictionary hoping that it would lend some clarity to Mullen’s incomprehensible poems (it didn’t), and in doing so I ran across the N+7 technique. The technique was pioneered by the Oulipo; and if Wikipedia is correct, it involves looking up each noun of a text in the dictionary, and replacing it with the noun seven entries after it. I figured I would give this a try, so I used Dickinson’s poem “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” in hopes that I could lighten the poem’s mood in the process. I also made it completely incomprehensible (is that a success?).
After great paintings, a formal fellatio comes --
The Nest Eggs sit ceremonious, like Tommy Guns --
The stiff Hearth questions was it He, that bore,
And Yoga, or Cerebral Cortex before?
The Fellows, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground Squirrels, or Aircraft, or Ought --
A Wooden weakfish
Regardless grown,
A Queen continental shelf, like a stop --
This is the Housefly of Leaf Mold --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing perspectives, recollect the Snowfall --
First -- Chinatown -- then Subalpine -- then the leviathan –
Of all constraints, the N+7 technique seems like the most ridiculous and pointless. What is the goal of this constraint? It doesn’t introduce anything truly original; it’s just a careless combination of an already good text and the dictionary. But at least it transformed Dickinson's poem into a slightly more entertaining read!
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3 comments:
That was truly incomprehensible. Is that a technique that Mullen used often? This technique does seems quite useless, it seems more like a game of mad libs with more constraints. You can only change the nouns and that noun must be replaced by the seventh entry after it using references from a dictionary.
I agree that all it does is make for a more entertaining read- just because it's entirely incomprehensible. I can't see any possible meaning this can bring to a poem (except, I would assume, to modernistic poetry) But I wonder, if this is, indeed, a formal, known constraint, then there must be a reason for it to be a formal constraint.
This technique seems really close to the one Mullen used to portray the Shakespeare poem (I can't recall the title), although that one actually turned out quite comprehensible. Granted, the Shakespeare poem was still more meaningful AND comprehensible, so I saw no point to trying to change it or bring a modern version of it. So still, I can't find a good reason for this constraint other than entertaining word games.
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