Very interesting theme for me, first an engineering connection then a throw back to the 1960s. Concrete immediately made me think of reinforced concrete so I decided on a piano hinge structure for this week’s book, with metal ‘poles’ for the ‘reinforcing’ – not sure they really work and a bit of a tenuous connection but it was fun trying out a structure I’ve not made before.
Looking for other examples of concrete poetry found a lovely one called John Cage Mesostic, which got me rambling away to myself again about what is poetry and I put some thoughts in a couple of ‘concrete’ blocks. The John Cage piece got me thinking about mesostics, which I’ve played with in the past and a reference somewhere sparked off the Tangent idea.
Last year I was contacted by someone who had come across my name in a Computer Arts Society event catalogue from 1969, Project Bard from Surrey University Poetry Group – I remembered being in the group but didn’t remember much about us writing a poetry producing program. In the same catalogue was this flow-chart for a computer poetry program – I would have liked to produce something like that for this book but my programming skills are out of date – consulting a friend she recommended Python; no time to learn it this week but I plan to.
I decided to include a mesostic I’d produced for a Frankenstein book I’d made, the final speech of the monster, and thought I’d redo that in a more ‘concrete’ style – very interesting how just using a different font totally changes the feel of the piece. Then some more playing about, including an actual concrete book made by a collaborator friend as a background to playing with some words again.
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