15 nov 2002

I found, in an old computer file, a recipe for a series of poems. Each poem would contain the following references, in successive lines: 1. mental disease, personality disorder ; 2. jazz musician; 3. occasion of domestic dispute; 4. generalization or stereotype; 5. solecism or grammatical error; 6. plagiarized line; 7. non-sequitur or logical fallacy; 8. free line; 9. gambling, odds or probability; 10. invented aphorism or proberb; 11. reference to a system of government or political philosophy; 12. idiotic idea; 13. autobographical detail; 14. sexual fetish or perversion. I also found fragments of the beginning of several poems written according to this formula. I think that I had planned to write 10, fourteen-line poems, with the elements in this order. Each line of each poem would be interchangeable, on the model of Queneau's "Cent mille millards de poèmes." I think it is 10 to the fourteenth power? I am going to work on these poems until they are all complete. I never got further than line 9 of any one of them. How could I have abandoned such a brilliant project? I will be publishing the poems on this blog as I complete them.

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