The potential to produce information

Poet Chris­t­ian Bök, on how con­straints equal cre­ativ­ity:

I think that my poet­ics makes it viable for me to excuse a whole vari­ety of obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­ders. It’s not Asperger syn­drome; it’s not a bug, it’s a fea­ture. Half the bat­tle of being a poet is try­ing to trans­form what would oth­er­wise be dis­missed as a weak­ness into a strength, try­ing to find ways in which some­thing that should fail under other cir­cum­stances finds an ecol­ogy within which it can succeed… 

I’ve put the con­straints in place in part to con­duct a kind of sci­en­tific exper­i­ment; I want to be sur­prised in a rel­a­tively rig­or­ous way by the work that I do. I think it’s almost impos­si­ble to sur­prise your­self because of course you’re sup­posed to know every­thing about your­self in advance. But by adopt­ing a series of oth­er­wise pro­gram­matic con­straints, you cre­ate a hypo­thet­i­cal set of con­trolled con­di­tions under which an exper­i­ment can be quite lit­er­ally con­ducted and the out­come has the poten­tial to be sur­pris­ing. In effect, it has the poten­tial to pro­duce information.*

Bök’s most famous book, Eunoia, restricts each chap­ter to a sin­gle vowel. So the “E” chap­ter pro­hibits any word with an A, I, O, or U. Here’s a short sec­tion from “I”:

Writ­ing is inhibit­ing. Sigh­ing, I sit, scrib­bling in ink this pid­gin script. I sing with nihilis­tic wit­ti­cism, dis­ci­plin­ing signs with tri­fling gim­micks imp­ish hijinks which high­light stick sig­ils. Isn’t it glib? Isn’t it chic? 

*P.S.: I wish I’d heard this talk, which was at the Kelly Writ­ers House here in Philadel­phia, if only to savor Bök’s punch­line. It’s tremendous:

I always joke with my stu­dents that poetry couldn’t pos­si­bly be as hard as they think it is, because if it were as hard as they thought it was, poets wouldn’t do it. Really, they’re the lazi­est, stu­pid­est peo­ple I know.