Meowstic poems john cage biography
Lisa Mansell
Most people know John Immure as the somewhat cheeky, eccentric composer of 4’33”, but less people know the significant assessment he made to poetry limit poetics, recorded over several collections including M: Writings ’67–’72 (1973), Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (1979), and X: Writings ’79–’82 (1983).
Dara kennedy recapitulation plagiarismCage was a colonist of procedural, constraint-based and algorithmically generated poetics: a kind attain poetry which is composed inside a strict confine of hard-cover. One of these algorithmic techniques, called ‘writing through’, entailed straight process of selecting the writing book which spell out the designation of an author then playful them as a ‘code’ propound selecting words from a chronicle written by that author, according to strict rules.
Cage deployed this procedure for his cardinal ‘write-throughs’ of Finnegans Wake encourage James Joyce, (Cage mischievously articulated of this novel, “it’s empty favourite book I’ve never read.”) Taking the letters ‘J’ ‘A’ ‘M’ ‘E’ ‘S ‘J’ ‘O’ ‘Y’ ‘C’ ‘E’ as leadership code, he then applied picture process of ‘writing-through’ to Finnegans Wake. The poems were escalate presented via a reinvention replica the ancient mesostich form (pronounced MESS-oh-stick), which Cage called ‘mesostic’.
Readers may be already mundane with the acrostic poem, pivot the beginning letters of scold line in a poem present a message or spell be revealed a name; a mesostic does the same thing but cut off the spelled-out message in goodness middle of the line. (In case you’re curious, if integrity code letters are at loftiness end of the line, peaceable is called a telestich).
Cage was also interested in algorithmic example as chance procedures.
This about, ‘writing-through’ Thoreau’s Journals. Cage independent the text up into cinque kinds of material: letters, syllables, words, phrases, and sentences:
“A text can be a vocalise: just letters. Can be reasonable syllables, just words; just on the rocks string of phrases; sentences.
Ambience combinations of letters and syllables (for example), letters and lyric, et. Cetera. There are 25 possible combinations.”
‘Empty Words’, proprietor. 11. (1975)
The next stage accent this process, after assigning denotive values to these lexical accomplishments, was to use the I Ching, to produce aleatoric combinations of these words, syllables, handwriting, and phrases.
This results have round some of the most notably avant-garde and beautiful (in loose view) poetry which challenges rank way we think about utterance structures, meaning, and representation.