Christopher Bök describes his 2001 collection Eunoia as a “univocal lipogram” which observes a rigorous set of linguistic constraints: each chapter must employ a single vowel and “allude self-reflexively to the act of writing, describe a feast, a prurient debauch, a nautical journey, and a pastoral landscape. Wherever possible, the text must adhere to syntactical parallelism, minimize repetition, accent internal rhyme, and exhaust at least 98% of all English univocalic words” (Voyce). Eunoia – which translates as “beautiful thinking” – traces its pentavocalic title to Book VIII of Aristotle’s Ethics and borrows its constraint-based methodology from Oulipo, a 1960s circle of French writers and mathematicians. In a collection born out of restriction, “CHAPTER O” spirals around the totality of divine order and doom. “CHAPTER O” places itself into a tradition of experimental poetry as processual reading practice, investigates a transactional, intertextual relationship between humanity and God, and probes the somber semantic resonances of o. Finally, “CHAPTER O” reveals the political potential of artworks activated by embodied “constraints.” 

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The subscript of “CHAPTER O” dedicates the poem to a univocalic artist in her own right: Yoko Ono. Well-known for her anti-war art and women’s liberation activism throughout the 1960s and 70s, Ono also performed as a principal member of Fluxus. While rejecting static identification as a “style” or even a “moment,” Fluxus inherited the “anti-art” stance of Dadaism and particularly emphasized art as a processual and participatory event (Smith). The typical Fluxus performance occurred in public space and followed an experimental theatrical or musical “event score.” Ono’s 1964 book Grapefruit remains a seminal Fluxus work: it provides instructions for various art “pieces” for its readers to interpret and perform at their own discretion. Keegan Cook Finberg’s dissertation, “From ‘Avant-Garde’ to ‘Experimental’: Reading Poetry After the 1960s,” theorizes this processual and participatory mode of poetry as a new form of reading practice in which “reading becomes more theatrical, or tied to spatial practices and enactment…[it] is an active, embodied practice that makes and unmakes the spaces around us” (Finberg 31, 33-34). Contemporaneous with Fluxus, Oulipo artists similarly prioritized the creative process over the creative product; albeit their works were “codified by mathematical principles and language games” (Finberg 180). Oulipians believed that enforcing rigorous constraints in their writing would uncover any number of normative forces operating on the writer – grammatical, semantic, literary, societal – and in turn, generate inexhaustible new ways of writing, reading, and thinking. Whereas Fluxus left their scored experimentations open to a certain degree of in-the-moment chance, Oulipians necessarily controlled the eruptions of generative potential in their works. I argue that Bök’s nod to Ono contextualizes Eunoia within a vein of experimental writing that sought to uncouple poetry from the page and transform the act of reading into an active, open, embodied practice, whether through performative event-scores or constraint-based literary creation. 

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In employing its univocalic formula, “CHAPTER O” uncovers a focused meditation on the embodied transactions between God and humanity. “CHAPTER O” perceives a terrifyingly mute relationship between God and his creations: “Folks who go to Sodom kowtow to Moloch, so God drops H-bombs of horror onto poor townsfolk…” (Bök line 5).With the fleeting pause of a subordinating conjunction emboldened by the certitude of a mathematical function, the actions of an ambiguous flock of “folks” “so” casually effects nuclear deluge (Bök line 4). Here, the embodied relationship between humanity and God becomes perceptible. Folks going to Sodom and kowtowing to Moloch precipitate God’s vengeance. Registering “go[ing] to Sodom” and “kowtow[ing] to Moloch” as active performances, the body exposes itself as the constrained site where faith is disciplined and correctly performed. “Folks who do not follow God’s norms word for word woo God’s scorn, for God frowns on fools who do not conform to orthodox protocol” (Bök lines 6-9). This line further evinces that it is a particular failure of the body to perform God’s norms “word for word” which incites his destructive anger and wrath. Cold, functional conjunctions – “...,so God” and “...,for God” syntactically propose a mute, transactional relationship between sinning human beings and a wrathful God. “CHAPTER O” reveals the conscription of the body into religious constraints and extends this exploration of constraint into “semantic overtones” of o (Perloff). 

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 What words orbit around o’s center? The visual symbol of o as a bomb is apparent: the vowel detonates in the text a tonal and linguistic exploration of itself. Perfect pairs like “brooks/crooks” flow and fissure; rigid directives like “plot,” “follow,” “conform,” “honor,” and “sow” form a monastery of functional motion (Bök lines 1-8). Bök’s use of o charts an overtly Christian verbal economy with “flocks lost to God,” “God’s word,” “cross of doloros” and “crown of thorns;” “monks” and “monkhood” (Bök lines 1-10). This evocation of the vowel’s Christian resonance extends intertextually, as well. Bök’s reference to the sinning city of Sodom echoes the second part of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which anaphorically casts “Moloch” as the charbydian center of industrial doom (Ginsberg). (Perhaps Bök’s syntactical parallelism contrasts that of Ginsberg’s Moloch in its eerie repetition of “God’s work; God drops; God’s scorn; God’s norms” (Bök lines 1-8).) Obeying its univocalic rule, “CHAPTER O” reveals the semantic resonance of o as one of inflexible and divine totality (Perloff). O’s stringent “proofs,” “norms,” and “orthodox protocol” exclusively form worlds of sorrow and horror. In its long intertextual wingspan, the vowel offers itself as a bridge between mortality throughout time: “Job and Lot know for whom songs of doom doth toll” (Bök lines 6-9). Under the auspices of o, the Christian universalization of individual suffering and death is achieved by sonically suturing Donne’s tolling bell into the worlds of Job and Lot (Bök lines 11-13). “CHAPTER O” ends its sonic juggling with “Oh, mondo doloroso,” a plea evocative of the infernal cries in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Using o as a lingual map, “CHAPTER O” weaves an intertextual web through its semantic investigations of order and doom.

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“CHAPTER O” suggests the political potential of a constraint-based poetry practice. In an interview with Stephen Voyce, Christopher Bök commented on the unrealized possibilities of constraint poetry: “Oulipo has so far left unexplicit, if not unexplored, the political potential of constraint itself, apparently preferring to "constrain" such potential, confining it primarily to a poetic, rather than a social, agenda.” He then offers insight into its capacity for social subversiveness, stating, “We can easily imagine using a constraint to expose some of the ideological foundations of discourse itself (perhaps by exaggerating the absurdist spectacle of arbitrary protocols in literature, making grotesque their approved grammar, their censored content, their repeated message, etc.)” (Voyce). Indeed, through its intertextual span and its deictic construction of the disciplined religious body, the poem’s univocalic rule exposes the orderly resonances of o. As constraints untangle and make legible the “absurdist spectacle of arbitrary protocols in literature,” they create poetry anew as specifically embodied reading practices. Performing a creative set of constraints blurs the relationship between “real space” and “poetic space” by shaping poetry as a bodily act that is “always emergent” (Finberg 172-173). Bök’s authorial practice depended upon a new interaction with the world: among other techniques, he crafted Eunonia by combing different dictionaries for univocalic words. In encountering Eunoia’s constraint, Bök’s audience in turn may access the act of reading – and more critically the act of reading as poetry – in new ways (Finberg 17, 20). “...By allowing our bodies to connect language to spatial practices through our active reading engagements,” Finberg writes, “we begin to unwind the constraints that dictate our normative world structures. This is an activist sort of reading—a mode of reading that disrupts” (Finberg 17, 223).

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“CHAPTER O” of Christopher Bök’s Eunoia adheres to a specifically Oulipian mode of creation that flows within a broader vein of experimental poetry. While constraint-based poetry houses the potential to deconstruct an array of linguistic and literary norms, it also implicates broader possibilities of (un)creating bodily practices, norms, and spaces. Finberg cites prominent artists of the women’s liberation movement who explored the confluence of constraints operating on their own bodies. Among the works is Yoko Ono’s 1964 Cut Piece, which explored the constraint of modesty upon the (mis)perception of women’s bodies and clothing, and the constraint of a female artist occupying supposedly paradoxical positions of the artist and the art, the active body and the body acted upon, the seer and the seen (Finberg 200). Feminist performance art remains a vibrant space where Oulipian constraints expose and “revise the ways that bodies are constructed in spaces under dominant paradigms” (Finberg 225). The translation of Oulipian methodology into various avenues of artistic creation offers us not only eunoia’s potential of beautiful thinking, but also beautiful new ways of reading, poeticizing, and creating together.