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Woody Alliances Laundered: OuLiPoems by Andy Brown and William Wordsworth

It is 210 years since Dorothy and William made their walk from Eusmere to Grasmere. In her journal, Dorothy wrote about the daffodils they had seen; William only wrote about them two years later, revising ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ with a fourth stanza for his 1815 Collected Poems. Pamela Woof describes how Dorothy’s diary is often "cited as the ‘source’ for Wordsworth’s poem”, but qualifies that “it is sweeping to judge Dorothy’s as the original”. Yet what happens if we credit Dorothy as originator? ‘Her Verses’ rewrites 'I wandered...' using OuLiPo monovocalism – one vowel, the letter E, represents the woman (Elle). ‘Without William’, reformulates the original as a Lipogram, removing his symbolic initial W. From these first steppings-out, Wordsworth and I worked on further transformations of his poem: Spoonerisms, Cockney Rhyming Slang, Anagrams and Riddles. ‘On Commerce’ employs the "N+7" rule of noun replacement, substituting nouns from a Dictionary of Commerce – a serendipitous substitution turning ‘poet’ into ‘Post Master’, Wordsworth’s elected profession. The poem reinvests some of Romanticism's celebrated radicalism, speaking of commercial concerns pertinent to our own political difficulties. ‘I Moved From Place to Place’ replaces the original nouns with their definitions, whilst ‘Daffodil Triptych’ makes a Structuralist inventory of the poem’s parts of speech. 'An Eclogue (Literally)’ subverts the pastoral genre, having Dorothy and William speak in a way that is indicative of certain lazinesses in our own linguistic culture. 'Japanese Haibun’ casts Wordsworth as Matsuo Basho, translating Romanticism into the Zen-like meditations of prose poem and haiku. In ‘From Feeling Into Words’ Seamus Heaney describes a poet’s challenge as to "delight in language". ‘Woody Alliances Laundered’ is an intertextual research exercise to do so: revisiting, re-evaluating and delighting in the language of the original.