Script Snippet

Today’s podcast is going to be about poetry, now not poetry as a whole but a specific type.

This type of form can be very confusing to look at if not looked at closely, and that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing during this time.

Procedural Poetry is a mosaic poem, you take pieces from something that doesn’t resemble a poem and turn it into one.

It consists of taking things such as newspapers, mail, letters, or articles and taking components of that to make something new, whether it be from the phrases, letters, or single word. It repurposes the component that was taken.

These poems are said to challenge our use of language, make us think of ways to use it that may normally never cross our minds.

These poets become more mechanical, because of the constraints of these poems.

One of the most popular explanations on how to create a poem like this is from Tristan’s Tzara’s dada manifesto.

Take a newspaper, Take some scissors.

Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article.

Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.

Shake gently.

Next take out each cutting one after the other.

Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

This poem will resemble you.

One poet that particularly stood out to me is John Cage

John Cage is a procedural poet from Los Angeles and attended Pomona College and University of California, where he studied with a classical composer.

Cage used a mesostic approach to his poems rather than an acrostic. Which in more simpler terms means the poem was led by the middle rather than the initial letters.

Another interesting thing about Cage is that he used sounds and music layered in his poems, such as Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on FInnegans Wake.

Cage believed that his style of writing was, “a way of writing that, though coming from ideas, is not about them but the produces them.”

What Cage is trying to make a point of is that the poems it’s self aren’t about the general idea of it as a whole, but the ideas it generates after.