Samhain \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Thanksgiving Moon<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
We’re into the next to last week of ModPo now, the poets of chance. \u00a0These poets push further away from authorial authority, even from the Steinian modernism and the Beat emphasis on automatic writing. \u00a0John Cage, familiar to many through his musical compositions, plays an important role in contemporary poetry, too. \u00a0He and Jackson Mac Low are the two poets of this bent I’ve studied so far.<\/p>\n
(John Cage)<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0An example is a third poet whom I studied in another section, Bernadette Mayer. \u00a0She has rules for creating new poetry out of old. \u00a0Pick a poem, any poem, and, say, take out all the prepositions. \u00a0Or, all the words beginning with a. \u00a0Perhaps removing every third letter or every third line. \u00a0Then, 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.<\/p>\n
The term oracle text comes from Cage’s fascination with the methodology of the I Ching, the Chinese taoist Book of Changes. \u00a0By casting straws the user of the I Ching can determine which of 64 hexagrams apply to a particular situation. \u00a0Cage adapted the notion of a method like casting straws to his creation of poetry in a manner resembling Mayers.<\/p>\n
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.” \u00a0Below it is the method he used. \u00a0Still not sure about this myself.<\/p>\n
Pedestrianism showed itself triumphant and disagreeable.
\nThat which was hidden worried them.
\nThey asked that her speech be repeated.
\nSummer light bears a likeness to justice.
\nThen the light is supposing attention.
\nThat section has a resemblance to light.
\nIs it a likeness of the justice chair?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Author’s Note:
\nEight strophes initially drawing upon the whole text of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.
\nI sent the entire text through DIASTEX5 (Charles O. Hartman’s 1994 update of DIASTEXT [1989],
\nhis automation of one of my diastic text-selection procedures [1963], using as a seed text
\nthe fifty-third paragraph of the book (exclusive of titles, etc), which begins, “A fact
\nis that when any direction is just like that, . . .” I selected the paragraph by random-digit
\nchance operations using the RAND Corporation’s table A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal
\nDeviates. (The Free Press, 1955).<\/p>\n
My source and seed texts came from the first edition of Tender Buttons, issued by Donald Evan’s I “mined” the program’s output for words which I included in 117 sentences (several elliptical While composing the 117 verse-line sentences, I divided them into eight strophes that New York: 20 September 1999<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Samhain \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Thanksgiving Moon Ritual purification proceeding according to the rules set down in the book of codes, an ancient text hidden deep beneath … Continue reading Ritual and Chance<\/span>
\npublishing house Claire Marie (1914), as posted online in The Bartleby Archive<\/a> (1995) and The New
\nBartleby Library (1999), both edited by Steven van Leeuwen, with editorial contributions by Gordon
\nDahlquist. However, I incorporated in my file of Tender Buttons fourteen corrections written
\nin ink in Stein’s hand, which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland’s copy of this edition,
\nnow owned by the Special Collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder.<\/p>\n
\nand each one a verse line) by changes and\/or additions of suffixes, pronouns, structure
\nwords, forms of “to be,” etc. and changes of word order. Initially, in making these sentences,
\nI placed lexical words’ root morphemes near others that were near them in the raw output–in fact
\nI included many phrases, and even whole verse lines, of unedited, though punctuated, ouput,
\nmostly in early strophes–but I was able to do this less and less in the course of writing the poem.<\/p>\n
\nsuccessively comprise numbers of sentences corresponding to the prime-number sequence
\n2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19.<\/p>\n