“The First Day”
An excerpt from The Raft
Leopold Haas Note on Constraints:
The Raft attempts a ‘translation’ of Schönberg’s twelve-tone theory of musical composition. For dodecaphony, all twelve tones of the octave (rather than the eight tones of the traditional chromatic scale) are sounded before repetition. The result is a new, democratic harmony: each tone is given equal importance, regardless of key. The task of The Raft is to translate (however impossibly) the twelve tones of the musical octave poetically. Interpreting tone as voice—The Raft serialises and permutates twelve voices or tones over twelve moments, in order to imagine a poetic/prosaic form that is not simply lyrical, epical, or dramatic, but tonal—a raft of voices, each with their own ‘pitch’, and each sounding off in accordance with the rules of twelve tone, for the duration of the work. In addition to “voice”, tone is also understood as “syllable”—and thus each line of the Raft is measured to an exact count of twelve or factor thereof, with spaces being incorporated as rests in music, with a count determined by the length of space. Uses of exclamation marks, dots, question marks are not given syllable or rest counts. They are marked-unmarked continuations of the word to which they are attached.
The narrative retells the famous story of ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, in which over one-hundred people perished off the coast of Senegal in 1816. This excerpt follows twelve characters, who find themselves consigned to a raft built from the remains of the sinking Medusa. Their provisions are running out and their chance of survival has just been cut—this is their first day.
Wave 3.5c
After Oulipo
November, 2010
Leopold Haas
Leopold Haas is an Australian poet and writer living in Dublin. “The First Day” is an excerpt from The Raft , a twelve-tone ‘poem’, based on Savigny and Correard’s survial account, Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal, and Gericault’s painting, ‘The Raft of the Medusa’. The Raft is forthcoming at Reality Street Editions .