The Game of Variations as Fluxus Poetry

Subject rhyming and wordplay

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my Variations game as a kind of poetry, which is the same as thinking about a certain kind of poetry as an example of my Variations game. The elements of poetry and play I have in mind are:

• the words and forms poetry is partly made of (notwithstanding Louis Zukofsky‘s view that poetry is made only of words, not ideas – or was that something Mallarmé had said to Degas?),
• the meanings poetry expresses (e.g. Ezra Pound’s idea of subject rhyme), and
• playful collaboration and competition (especially word games, as opposed to games such as tennis, soccer, chess and go which have rules, but are generally unconcerned with either language or meaning).

Let’s look at examples of these three, and then think about how they combine, which is where my main interest lies.

• The Dada poet Hugo Ball’s play of sounds and phonemes (‘Gadji beri bimba’) is apparently meaningless, and whether or not he had something particular to say in these poems will remain a mystery. Any poetry driven by sound rhyme alone is in a similar category, except to the extent that the play of sounds is balanced by the poet having something to say which is independent of the rhymes, and which drives the rhymes rather than being driven by them. John Milton drew the same contrast, decrying phonic rhyming as ‘the jingling sound of like endings’ in contrast to his own poetics of ‘sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another.’
• Pound referred to his idea of ‘subject rhyme’ in an early letter to his father about the Cantos sequence he was beginning, and continued to develop the concept throughout his life. Hugh Kenner subsequently developed and generalised the concept beyond poetry in The Pound Era, and in Fresco and Fugue Kay Davis traced it back from Pound’s Cantos to the laisses similaires and concept repetitions of Old Occitan and Old French poetry, and Old Norse ring composition, all of which Pound studied closely. In fact, the subject rhyme’s roots reach to the very beginning of poetry in many traditions, for example as semantic parallelism in the Ugaritic tablets and later the Hebrew bible and repetitive parallel structures in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, Homeric simile, and the allusive variation of ideas in Chinese and Japanese poetry both old and new.
• Pure play is best represented by abstract games, for example go, nim, and backgammon, which do not ultimately mean anything, and can be reconfigured in other ways which would amount to the same type of essentially meaningless game. An overall interpretation can be read into even abstract games, for example go as a game of conquest and territory, but meaning becomes an integral part of games such as charades or Pictionary (communicating a given idea non-verbally), categories or Scattergories (naming objects within a set of categories, given an initial letter), and Scrabble (where individual words must be ‘officially’ meaningful). Role playing games introduce another level of meaning to games in terms of their overall narrative and characters.

There is an entire spectrum of ‘poetry as words’ ranging from Ball’s Dada poetry to ‘poetry as thought’ and Pound’s idealised thought rhymes. In practice, they are often used in service of each other, with subject rhyme working alongside linguistic/lexical play as complementary poetic techniques. As Adele Berlin says, ‘phonological similarity or equivalence promotes the perception of semantic equivalence.’ Nevertheless, the two types can also occur in relative isolation.

Similarly, while games can sometimes be meaningless, they can also be themed, information rich, educational and playfully full of meaning, and anywhere on the spectrum in between.

Poetry as play

As far as the explicitly ludic aspect in poetry is concerned, there have been many incursions into the space between games and poetry, including some where overall semantic content has been set aside almost entirely in the interest of literally playing with words, as in Ken Friedman’s Corsage Kit which provides a selection of words printed on small slips of paper and some pins, but no further directions.

Other examples include both the lexical and the semantic content of the poetry. Poetry competitions and verbal jousting can be found in classical Greek and Latin amoebaean verse, for example in Thucidides (Idyll V) and Virgil (Eclogues 3 and 7), and imitated in ‘singing competitions’ in Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar and Sidney’s The May Lady, Arabic naqa’id, Occitan partimen, Old French jeux partis, Mande sanankuya, Nigerian insulting contests in Igbo ikocha nkotcha and Hausa ba’a, Finnic kilpalaulanta, Old English and Scottish flyting, through to playing the dozens and rap battling. Some of these displays of rhetoric are thematically related (even if the theme may be crude observations about ‘yo mama’), including the recent innovation of the ‘theme slam.’ In other cases, correspondences in parallel poetic structures allow us to make inferences about analogies being proposed by the poet.

I like to imagine that the erotic poetry games Catullus played with Licinius, as he recalls in Poem 30, had subject rhymes to the fore. There are also content connections in the collaborative ‘linked verse’ games of Chinese lianju and Japanese renga and haikai, and connoisseurs have distinguished and valued different types of content link at various stages of the genre’s development. The surrealist Exquisite Corpse game is a modern inversion of the technique which is intended to result in intriguing semantic disjunctions and interesting juxtapositions, as ‪in the collaborative Ralentir Travaux (1930) by Surrealist French poets André Breton, Paul Éluard and René Char. ‬

Contemporary collaborative poetry is thriving, and has been anthologised in Saints of Hysteria (2007). Recent efforts include the multi-participant Poem Factory from asdaa’, an Arabic poetry wiki active in 2008, and S.J. Fowler’s ongoing Enemies project which has involved more than 500 poets from 21 countries since 2011, as well as duets such as Tapestry by Avril Meallem and Shernaz Wadia. ‪

Renga: A chain of poems (1972) by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Eduardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson was inspired by Japanese renga, and has itself since inspired other non-Japanese collaborative renga such as Linked Alive (1990) from Canada.

Variations as a poetry game

In the Variations game design I have curated certain themes and contexts to propose something about interconnectedness, reexpression and reinterpretation, rather than demonstrate specific connections, expressions and interpretations as found in a fixed poem. In my game, the connections surface only in the act of anybody playing the game and finding their own connections, just as in Fluxus poetry the performance itself creates the result.

The defining common feature of all the different ways to play with the Variations cards (and also the more generic Rattlesnake games) is a theme varying across different contexts. This puts them all in the top circle of our Venn diagram, where the meaning is the link that unites the whole.

The Variations game may be played solitaire or competitively/collaboratively, purely to link a given theme with various contexts, and with no constraints on how the links are expressed. This is the version of Variations as initially designed, when I considered it enough of a challenge just to make thought rhymes, perhaps overlooking Berlin’s principle that the way a semantic link is expressed can give it more strength.

The solitaire game may include some formal constraints, for example forming a haiku with one line connecting each of three contexts to a given theme, or competitively/collaboratively with all players writing their own haikai to be judged or linked together.

There’s a difference between one person writing a haiku to link a given theme with three random contexts, and three people all trying to write the best such haiku, or three people contributing a line each. They’re all poetic and playful, but the emphasis is different in each case.

And in all cases, or at least when it works well, an overall meaning might be construed about the theme, or even something more.

Poetry as a Variations game

Is this discovery process so different from readers finding their own interpretations of both ‘readable’ and ‘difficult’ poems? For example, here’s one thread of J.H. Prynne’s ‘difficult’ Blue Slides at Rest expressed as a game of Variations, on the theme of ‘temporal occlusion’ (the necessity of acting with only inevitably incomplete information, and the mistakes sometimes made as a result). Bearing in mind the poem was written in 2003, contexts then topical for Prynne’s variations on the theme included the supposed discovery of cold fusion in the domain of electrochemistry, Iraq and the ‘dodgy dossier’ about alleged weapons of mass destruction (and the children’s story of Chicken Licken thinking the sky was falling when an acorn fell on his head), and the actions (and inactions) of child protection agencies to intervene in cases of alleged abuse.

Like the Variations game, any reading of any poem is interactive, indeterminate, and incomplete.

So read/play on!

***

For the Fluxus Variations card deck, and related publications, visit https://shorturl.at/6hrGb