So speaking of "I Love Mondays!", this is the text of the first time I read there, in January 2006. Attendance was mandatory. I read a poem for each person in the audience (in my twelve-minute slot). If I knew someone was going to be there, I wrote a poem specifically for them; there were several unassigned poems that turned out to have been written specifically for unexpected audience members.
I don't have much to say about the process of writing these poems. The formal idea I'm exploring should be fairly obvious. I wrote many of them in the shower, where I was unable to write anything down, in order to make them as memorable (or memorizable) as possible.
You can download a pdf of The Redundancies. Thanks to Gabriel Liston for the cover artwork. You might also want to check out the other pdfs I've posted.
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.
For a while I was interested in "interestingness". For a while I was interested in "infinity". For a while I thought that it would be interesting to create a work that was infinitely long but which, to someone (probably me), for some reason, by some metric, might be interesting along its entire length.
This was the closest I came. Keep Walking is probably impossible to read to one's self and get any pleasure out of. It is more of a script or a score than a poem, or more of a performance poem. For a while I was thinking about Morton Feldman and issues of scale and repetition and variation. For a while I was thinking about how we evaluate poetry, and the impossibility of engaging with "the total object", the poem in all its senses and manifestations, the elusiveness, and how being "elusive" relates to being "interesting".
I have never performed this entire piece aloud, but in order to get a sense of what it would sound like, I had the computer read it, and the computer's cool and clinical voice worked nicely with the text, and so, pending a human reading, I offer it to you. It is four hours long. It could have been longer, but I didn't think it would continue being interesting.
I would read the whole thing on request, though. It would, I hope, be interesting.
Download the pdf of Keep Walking. Or, perhaps better yet, listen to the mp3 (4 hours, 84Mb).
I have these manuscripts sitting on my hard drive, where they do me and the world no particular good at all. So I have decided to start putting them online in pdfs -- hopefully, pdfs which will be easy and pleasurable to read on the computer (which means they are not being designed to be printed out).
I'm going to start with 5×5×5(×5), which, as its name suggests, is a series of 125 five-word poems. They were inspired by Bob Perelman, I suppose. In his poem "Chronic Meanings" he wrote: "Five words can say only." For me, this rubbed up against the idea that people can keep five things, more or less, in mind at once. Then, after an event celebrating the release of his book The Marginalization of Poetry, I wrote these poems in a frenzy, in exactly two hours.
I've often presented these poems in random order, or in random selections, although many of the poems relate to their number in the sequence. I tore through the entire sequence in ten minutes at the Poetland event a few years ago, and one of the poems was quoted in a review of the event in the Oregonian.
The photograph in the cover of the pdf is by Anthony Easton.
Download 5×5×5(×5).
Update: A very nice review by Geof Huth.