(41) The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant-- Queneau.
It is as if there were a hermetic boundary between two domains: the one wherein the observance of rules is a natural fact, and the one wherein the excess of rules is perceived as shameful artifice.
...to the extent that constraint goes beyond rules which seem natural only to those people who have barely questioned language, it forces the system out of its routine functioning, thereby compelling it to reveal its hidden resources.
Also: helpful graphs aligning the objects of linguistics (letter, phoneme, syllable, word, syntagm, sentence, paragraph) and literary operation (displacement, substitution, addition, subtraction, multiplication (repetition), division, deduction, contraction).
As I'm reading through the theory in the section I labeled "Procedural Poetry and Poetics of Spatiality," I keep nodding as I'm reading that we can't escape form-- and as someone who responds really really well to limits, this all makes sense-- and I'd like to try some of these ideas, not as exercises, but incorporated into my practice-- esp. from earlier, Dan Zimmerman's anagram thing, but also play around with "fixed forms" whatever that means. This makes me appreciate Laynie Browne's sonnets even more--
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