23 Aug 2010 01:49:56
The best seller book in Canadian poetry was the book called Eunoia. This book the best from all the time. It is a deeply clever volume: each of its five chapters uses only one vowel (the first chapter uses only 'a’, the second chapter 'e’, etc). The title, in contrast to the text, presents a word engorged with vowels: 'eunoia’ is the shortest word that contains all five vowels, and means in Greek 'beautiful thinking’. I asked Christian Bök how he had come across it, and he told me: 'The word “eunoia” was coined by Aristotle, in fact, and I came across it at about the same time as I began writing the book. It seemed a natural fit, since the second shortest word containing all five vowels is “Sequoia”, which seemed less pertinent to my project. I discovered many years later that there is also an obscure Greek word that contains only the five vowels (with no consonants) – “Iouea,” which refers to a genus of fossil sponges. I still think that I chose the best option.’
