Van Valckenborch’s Cube

Stanzarooms: Quennets for Floor, 4 Walls and Ceiling

macroversion for the interior of a room
microversion for the inside of a folded paper cube

 

Vew Van Valckenborch's Cube here

 

Note

Author Robert Sheppard has supplied the following long note: ‘Translator Martin Krol has supplied the following note: “René Van Valckenborch has supplied the following brief note: ‘The “quennet” is a quasi-Oulipean form devised by Raymond Queneau for part one of his final book Morale Élémentaire.’ However we feel drawn to add that Van Valckenborch has added constraints of his own in that this work is designed to be inscribed on the interior of a cube/room.” The rules for the quennet are to be found in David Bellos’ introduction to Elementary Morality (trans. Philip Terry): “Three two-line stanzas, line 1 of each consisting of three phrases and line 2 of one phrase, each phrase formed by a noun-adjective pair followed by Seven lines of at least two and not more than seven syllables followed by One two-line stanza conforming to the same constraint as at the start. Rhymes, assonances, and repetitions between phrases and the ‘middle lines’ (what Queneau called ‘the refrain’) are not regulated but positively encouraged.” Krol adds: “Much of the artifice has been lost in translation.”’ Sheppard concludes: ‘Much of the artifice is translation. Van Valckenborch is a constraint of a kind.’ What Sheppard is not telling us is that, firstly, René Van Valckenborch is a Belgian poet, distinguished by the fact that he appears to have written two distinct oeuvres, one in Walloon and the other in Flemish – the ‘Roomstanzas’ come from the latter – and secondly that much of the translation is artifice. See http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html, 25th October 2009 posting, for more on this incredible discovery.

Wave 3.5c
After Oulipo

November, 2010

Robert Sheppard

Robert Sheppard’s most recent book of poems is Warrant Error (Shearsman 2009), though he has another, as well as a prose creative unwriting The Given, in preparation. Complete Twentieth Century Blues was published by Salt in 2008. Many of these poems were marked by systems and constraints (word-count, alphabetical arrangement).

He is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University and edits Pages, a blogzine of poetry (see www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com). As a critic he has published The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool University Press 2005) and Iain Sinclair (Northcote House 2007); most recently he has edited the poetry of Paul Evans: The Door at Taldir (Shearsman 2009).