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Jhave: cON cRETE pOETRY
About cON cRETE pOETRY :
cON cRETE pOETRY began as a way to keep sane while writing a preliminary rough outline of my doctoral thesis in late Nov and Dec. 2010. I vowed to create one concrete/generative poem each week night. So I began inserting arrays (of words, spam, phrases too weird for the thesis) into a rudimentary word-shredding action-script module that I had already built and used for a few other works. Using this machine I could generate many verses out of sets of words very quickly, grabbing them offline and constructing contexts into which they might fit.
As the project evolved, meaningful moments emerged from code wrack and algorithm spew. The flickering poems congealed into a set. They began to inhabit a single html page so that I could review my progress. And without my realizing it became a single work: a churning monochrome machine of word-spasms. A paean to constrained randomness.
The homage poems at the top came at the end of the process, as my interest in the semantic collisions of disparate affinities (to paraphrase Paul Eluard, early 20th century surrealist poet) waned. Gomringer’s Wind awaits a real 3D interpretation. Lionel Kearns' Birth of God is a key work in the history of visual digital poetics. Accept them as seeds in the ongoing mimetic conversation of poets across epochs. A testament to the influence of anxiety.
Concrete poetry has often celebrated austerity. The flickering numbers at the top of the page display the audio peaks on every frame. The minimalist means of concrete recycled in minimalist code. A quick fix to a speed addicted culture.
Keywords: Reductionist, retro, recidivist, rete, oetry.
Read, view and hear the work here.
About Jhave:
Jhave (www.glia.ca) is a digital-poet. He makes digital installations and websites with words.
As of 2011, he is writing a PhD thesis at Concordia University in Montreal on Digital Poetry as Ontological Probe. Parallel to that, he is trying to stay sane.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.