aleatory poetry

Hadbeen variety (PoemTalk #135)

John Cage, 'Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake'

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Marjorie Perloff, Danny Snelson, and Nancy Perloff convened with Al Filreis at Marjorie Perloff’s home in Los Angeles to discuss John Cage’s mesostic abridgement of James Joyce, “Writing for a Second Time through Finnegans Wake.” Nothwithstanding its status as an intense selection or condensation of the original text, the resulting “writing through” is too long for PoemTalk’s signature “close but not too close reading,” so the group focuses on the opening pages of the Cage text. “Writing for a Second Time,” including the methodological preface, has been published in Empty Words; the pages we discuss (37–42) have been made available through PennSound here.

Nick Montfort's hard west turn

Arriving on my desk this week — the result, apparently, of a quick visit to Philadelphia by Nick Montfort — is a remarkable excerpt from Montfort's 2018 work, Hard West Turn. This No Press pamphlet takes pages 213 through 216 from the work. Go here to find out how to acquire this or any of Nick's work. No Press is the wonderful ongoing creation of Derek Beaulieu of Calgary (now, precisely, of Banff). Hard West Turn was computer generated using text from the English Wikipedia and the Simple English Wikipedia. Information about the book can be found here.  Information about No Press can be found here. Another recent work by Nick Montfort: “Leaflet of Eden,” a sheet folded twice, printed by Nick himself, in Cambridge, on a dot matrix printer.

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