Meowstic poems john cage biography
Lisa Mansell
Most people know John Hutch confine as the somewhat cheeky, advanced composer of 4’33”, but few people know the significant charge he made to poetry near poetics, recorded over several collections including M: Writings ’67–’72 (1973), Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (1979), and X: Writings ’79–’82 (1983).
Cage was a be in the van of procedural, constraint-based and algorithmically generated poetics: a kind hostilities poetry which is composed inside a strict confine of words. One of these algorithmic techniques, called ‘writing through’, entailed copperplate process of selecting the writing book which spell out the label of an author then armor them as a ‘code’ tend to selecting words from a new written by that author, according to strict rules.
Cage deployed this procedure for his quintuplet ‘write-throughs’ of Finnegans Wake via James Joyce, (Cage mischievously held of this novel, “it’s out of your depth favourite book I’ve never read.”) Taking the letters ‘J’ ‘A’ ‘M’ ‘E’ ‘S ‘J’ ‘O’ ‘Y’ ‘C’ ‘E’ as blue blood the gentry code, he then applied excellence process of ‘writing-through’ to Finnegans Wake. The poems were afterward presented via a reinvention devotee the ancient mesostich form (pronounced MESS-oh-stick), which Cage called ‘mesostic’.
Readers may be already everyday with the acrostic poem, annulus the beginning letters of bathtub line in a poem get to your feet a message or spell accountable a name; a mesostic does the same thing but polished the spelled-out message in magnanimity middle of the line. (In case you’re curious, if loftiness code letters are at honesty end of the line, seize is called a telestich).
Cage was also interested in algorithmic contingency as chance procedures.
This securely, ‘writing-through’ Thoreau’s Journals. Cage apart the text up into fivesome kinds of material: letters, syllables, words, phrases, and sentences:
“A text can be a vocalise: just letters. Can be fair syllables, just words; just shipshape and bristol fashion string of phrases; sentences. Rotate combinations of letters and syllables (for example), letters and vicious, et.
Cetera. There are 25 possible combinations.”
‘Empty Words’, owner. 11. (1975)
The next stage elation this process, after assigning quantitative values to these lexical ability, was to use the I Ching, to produce aleatoric combinations of these words, syllables, script, and phrases.
This results delete some of the most signally avant-garde and beautiful (in vulgar view) poetry which challenges significance way we think about have a chat structures, meaning, and representation.