Mal Arme

Poetry. With art by Paul Collins. MAL ARME represents the third stage of a series of Oulipian books that started with LETTER DROP (2000), continued with MI SING (Book Thug 2004), and will conclude with The Occasional Troubadour (forthcoming 2010). The first three volumes each consist of 26 Lipograms, lettered A thru Z, wherein the A poems have no As, the B poems have no Bs, etc. The first book excavated an assortment of texts ranging from the 1928 edition (the 9th) of Sir Morell MacKenzie's Hygiene of the Vocal Organs to such fictions as Tom Swift and His House on Wheels. MI SING reverts to a single text for its sources and inspiration: Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. The current text plays close attention to the prose writings of St phane Mallarm in translation. The fourth continues its author's fascination with all things French by roaming through that country's southeast regions through a two-volume study published in 1898 called The Troubadours at Home.