Maryland's Classical Music Station

Univocals

By “univocal” I’m not referring to a singular song but to a form of writing that is constrained by using just a single vowel, like “No cool monsoons blow soft on Oxford dons” (credit to the 19th century poet, C.C Bombaugh).  The best known contemporary example is by the Canadian poet, Christian Bök, who has written an entire book called Eunoia (one of the shortest words to contain all the vowels), which uses just one vowel in each of its five chapters.  He spent seven years compiling the book, and read the dictionary five times (once for each vowel, I assume) looking for words that contained just a single vowel.  He then arranged the words into nouns, verbs and other parts of speech, and finally into groups of words.  Chapter A begins, “Awkward grammar appalls a craftsman”.

The reason I know all this (which I didn’t just two weeks ago) is because one of the courses I am taking this semester for my MFA in creative writing, is in Experimental Forms.  Often experimental writers regard the word as an end in itself and the meaning as incidental, and the idea reminded me of the composers of the 2nd Viennese School—Schönberg, Berg and Webern—writing tone rows that were an interesting exercise in experimentation with note patterns, with melody being incidental.  (Or so it seems to me.)

Well, we had an exercise in the class to experiment with univocals, and I decided to write a piece, which I called Arts Enter In On Us, taking an art form per paragraph (visual art, acting, dance, music, literature, etc.) and writing five sentences about each one, using the vowels sequentially.  It almost fried my brain.  Believe me, it’s more complicated than it seems!  Here is the music paragraph:

 As Ax taps an A-flat and plays a fast rat-a-tat, all “Ah!” and clap—what a blast! We feel the reverence.  Still, if I blink I miss it.  Bow slow rondos, Yo-Yo, don’t bow too gross!  Just strum—thrum thrum!

Tags:fun, odd, writing