Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Ritual purification proceeding according to the rules set down in the book of codes, an ancient text hidden deep beneath the skyscraper headquarters of Insurance Company. The plan is working.
We’re into the next to last week of ModPo now, the poets of chance. These poets push further away from authorial authority, even from the Steinian modernism and the Beat emphasis on automatic writing. John Cage, familiar to many through his musical compositions, plays an important role in contemporary poetry, too. He and Jackson Mac Low are the two poets of this bent I’ve studied so far.
(John Cage)
The key move among these poets is a deterministic method of creating poetry that removes the creative act from writing, putting it instead in the creation of various methods for choosing words, texts, lines. An example is a third poet whom I studied in another section, Bernadette Mayer. She has rules for creating new poetry out of old. Pick a poem, any poem, and, say, take out all the prepositions. Or, all the words beginning with a. Perhaps removing every third letter or every third line. Then, there is a new piece, based on what Cage called a seed text, or an oracle text, one that served as the material from which the method would create a new work.
The term oracle text comes from Cage’s fascination with the methodology of the I Ching, the Chinese taoist Book of Changes. By casting straws the user of the I Ching can determine which of 64 hexagrams apply to a particular situation. Cage adapted the notion of a method like casting straws to his creation of poetry in a manner resembling Mayers.
Here is a portion of Mac Low’s “Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair” created by applying a rigorous method to Gertrude Stein’s famous “Tender Buttons.” Below it is the method he used. Still not sure about this myself.
Pedestrianism showed itself triumphant and disagreeable.
That which was hidden worried them.
They asked that her speech be repeated.
Summer light bears a likeness to justice.
Then the light is supposing attention.
That section has a resemblance to light.
Is it a likeness of the justice chair?
Author’s Note:
Eight strophes initially drawing upon the whole text of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.
I sent the entire text through DIASTEX5 (Charles O. Hartman’s 1994 update of DIASTEXT [1989],
his automation of one of my diastic text-selection procedures [1963], using as a seed text
the fifty-third paragraph of the book (exclusive of titles, etc), which begins, “A fact
is that when any direction is just like that, . . .” I selected the paragraph by random-digit
chance operations using the RAND Corporation’s table A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal
Deviates. (The Free Press, 1955).
My source and seed texts came from the first edition of Tender Buttons, issued by Donald Evan’s
publishing house Claire Marie (1914), as posted online in The Bartleby Archive (1995) and The New
Bartleby Library (1999), both edited by Steven van Leeuwen, with editorial contributions by Gordon
Dahlquist. However, I incorporated in my file of Tender Buttons fourteen corrections written
in ink in Stein’s hand, which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland’s copy of this edition,
now owned by the Special Collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
I “mined” the program’s output for words which I included in 117 sentences (several elliptical
and each one a verse line) by changes and/or additions of suffixes, pronouns, structure
words, forms of “to be,” etc. and changes of word order. Initially, in making these sentences,
I placed lexical words’ root morphemes near others that were near them in the raw output–in fact
I included many phrases, and even whole verse lines, of unedited, though punctuated, ouput,
mostly in early strophes–but I was able to do this less and less in the course of writing the poem.
While composing the 117 verse-line sentences, I divided them into eight strophes that
successively comprise numbers of sentences corresponding to the prime-number sequence
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19.
New York: 20 September 1999
