Exhausted Yet? Cut up Machines, Code Poetry and More

First, Nada Gordon explains the world to us. 

(2019 note: Actually, this is just her reading a funny poem about art at the Whitney over ten years ago. I was there. It was sort of a Ken Goldsmith celebration.)

Here Nada Gordon wanders her kitchen and explains the realm of lyric-loathing -- lyric as "whipping girl" -- that brought us flarf. She discusses being educated by the critique of the lyrical subject, and the resulting decision to create lyrical voices out of shards, borrowed language and collage; she claims that flarf really carries the torch for poetry. She says, basically, We are dedicated to saving poetry and keeping it alive. The whipping girl, the lyrical subject, is now revived by flarfists as a zombie. (Which is pretty well what the first link is doing.) 

See what I mean? Trying to find something new can drive a poet crazy. Which is generally where a poet likes to be. And has been for a century, but we'll just start with the Fifties. 

From the 2017 Getty show on Concrete Poetry of the 50s, 60s and 70s. 

1975 performance of "Peter Innisfree Moore" by Jackson Mac Low, a poem/song/dance created by finding 960 words in the Fluxus photographer's (Moore's) name and using chance operations to express (also musical notes, dance moves, etc.)

Nice roundup of experimental poetry from textext.com.

A link to the Language Is a Virus cut-up machine. 

Check "Recombinant Code Poetry" at the bottom of the options on this archived page from Beehive.

Fantastic link re: L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E P-O-E-T-R-Y.

And, a propos of something related, syllabus from hypertexter Stephanie Strickland. 

To think about Strickland and the proliferation of options, it's nice to remember Raymond Queneau, who created a flip book of sonnets in which the lines were cut so that the reader might create 190 million poems. Then he went and titled it Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Randomization designed to destroy narrative and kill author/birth reader. Yes.

Queneau's pals formed Oulipo, hoping to create artificial constraints that would remind us of the real ones we live with all the time. My favorite take-away has been the N+7, a process that replaces every noun with the seventh noun following it in the dictionary. Here is Spoonbill's N+7 machine.  Here are a few examples.  

17 GOOGLE poems linked on Huff Post.

Czech poet and mathematician Ladislav Nebeský (b. 1937) (whose father was murdered by the Nazis in 1940) began as a concrete poet and ended as a binary poet.  Here are "8 Planar Binary poems." And here are his "Non-Written Words."

Flarf starring Sharon Mesmer. 

And my favorite Vito Acconci.

Don't forget Alan Sondheim. 



"All art should become science, 
and all science art." 
(Friedrich Schlegel)