Buggeryville

These are old.

This is the oldest manuscript of mine that I'd bother with. These are based on old poems. The Constellated Sonnets is a series of 150 poems in which all the words in each line but one are erased from Shakespeare's sonnets. The punctuation, as you'll see, is left behind. The words were randomly left behind; there was a second sequence that I started, The Collected Sonnets, which was going to feature words that I intentionally selected, but those were so much more boring that I abandoned the process after about a dozen poems.

Then, a few years later, I found out (by stumbling upon his book in the Strand) that Stephen Ratcliffe had done something remarkably similar a few years before I had. Then, a few more years later, Jen Bervin did something remarkably similar, and received a fair amount of acclaim for it. Perhaps there are a few other such projects floating about. Perhaps it is a hopelessly obvious thing to write.

Well, there are some differences between all three texts. Mine is the most rigorous, but also I think mine is the only one that uses a random method on the text; Bervin's prints the "unused" portions of the text greyed out, which allows more interplay between the original and her erased version. None of us, unless I misremember, did all 154 sonnets, but I came closest.

Nevertheless, I believe mine is the only manuscript that you can download in its entirety: The Constellated Sonnets.