King of the Lost and Found by John Lekich

Harry Mathews had the nerve to write a series of poems with end-line eye-rimes, even riming “zany” with “botany”… Jacques Jouet wrote a book of love poems written in the Great Ape language presented in a 300-word Ape-French lexicon by Francis Lacassin, who claimed to have got the Ape words from a self-published book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a book that has unfortunately become unavailable. In the chapter that follows this little preface I will mention OuLiPo and my admiration for writers such as Raymond Queneau and Harry Mathews who create books that show a victory over constraints set on the writing, constraints set by the writers themselves. Then after the near year had elapsed, I came to typing the results, and sometimes the efforts to make out my blind handwriting contributed to the last draft of the probable serial.īowering’s preface on how I wrote certain of my books begins:

Sounds arrived from other rooms and from Larch, which was a semi-through street. And I think that I spoke aloud or sang little airs. I read a book while I was writing on pages that I did not look at. This room, I should say was over-filled with books, pictures, gewgaws, manuscripts, bicycles, hats, all the detritus that the muse has to tiptoe around. I sat facing north, with daylight coming into the room for the Larch Street (west) side. I don’t remember exactly what I did, but I do remember that it seemed important to carry out the activity in the same place every time, my writing room in our big old house in Kerrisdale. But over eleven months in 1973-74, I conducted a little experiment. Chance operations I found a little more interesting. So Surrealism and Dada and so on I gave passing notice. I had always been less than fervid about art stuff that had to do with the so-called unconscious or subconscious. I just read the reports and made up my own procedure.

I did not duplicate their experiments, of course, mainly because I did not want to work on subjects aside from myself. The two reports were originally published in Psychological Review. It’s a record of experiments the two med students were conducting at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1890s. Solomons) Motor Automatism, a booklet published by the Phoenix Book Shop in 1969. I had read Gertrude Stein’s (with Leon M. The book has 26 chapters in which Bowering explains what led him to write those 26 (books and individual poems).īowering uses a strange technique, and variations of it, so as to be in a state of writing in which what he puts down on paper is a combination of random and a stream of conciousness to which he also imposes parameters.Ĭonsider from Cereals for Roughage (1976) page 62: But what really amazed me the most was to find out that my image of a poet sitting down to write a poem was as far off from the mark judging by Bowering procedures. It blew me away with a combination of humour and erudition.

King of the Lost and Found by John Lekich