Eun
oia ("beautiful thinking") is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels.
It is also the title of a
poetry collection by Canadian author Christian Bok. In addition to writing each chapter using only words that contain one vowel, (
Flash presentation of Chapter "E") Bok also
greatly limits himself in other ways.
An amazing accomplishment that won the $40 000 Griffith Poetry Prize in 2002,
Eun
oia is best experienced in its spoken form. (
MP3 links)
(If you don't know Bok's poetry, you still might know his other work. He has also created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.)
posted by Jaybo
on Jul 22, 2004 -
18 comments
"Listening Post," on now at the Whitney Museum, gathers conversational snippets from thousands of chat rooms and bulletin boards, structures them according to word counts, common phrases and other criteria and then displays them on a grid of more than 200 small rectangular electronic screens. Last week's New Yorker admired the resulting "found poems": "Duct tape and plastic for the White House duct tape, and water in the bathtub, eheh hmmm...."
posted by capiscum
on Mar 11, 2003 -
3 comments