Monday, August 11, 2008

An empty ice-box emits its guttural buzz,
sparking light at twenty five past one

onto a kitchen clock. Nothing came out straight.

A cupboard; stale bread, chickpeas,
can of Guinness; and beyond a window,

the garden seemed to unravel - patterning
wheat (no milk) two cigarettes

and last to feel regal under striplight,
a cellophane reflection glowing awake -

swimming in the lone dark vat of night,
pitching a planet last to walk -

a light into the door of a UFO.

~

The above text came out of a *write-through* exercise, which is the natural evolution of the cut-up method Burroughs made popular. Working with the word-processing mouse technology, we can move electronic-text about so much faster than with scissors and paper.

This means that the standard unit to work with in this form, rather than being a line of text, we are thinking and working at word-level, shuffling them about on the screen with space-age fluidity.

The PC has revolutionised how we can work with text, and this form comes under many names, the latest being *mash-up*, and now there are Poem softwares which we can feed text into, and it returns a computer poem, thus cutting out the middle person of our mind.

The software applications are really a novelty, and it will be a while yet before we can purchase technology which will recreate in poetry, the Human experience.

The source text for the above is here.

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