Four Guillemets

Abstract

Four Guillemets Loss Pequeño Glazier (bio) Four Guillemets is comprised of four digital poems, each with an impulse-selected determinate print version which is sometimes delivered as a live performance. The project investigates the relationship between text and poetic structure by offering alternative experiences of each poem in print/static, performance, and digital environments. What follows is a brief description of the project (as well as how the print versions are digitally generated) and one possible print arrangement, which the author performed live on February 1, 2013. You can find a link to the full digital project, as well as video of the live poetry/dance performance of particular piece on the I/O section of Cream City Review's website (https://uwm.edu/creamcityreview/i-o/). Full generative digital project here: http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/glazier/e-poetry/guillemets/ [End Page 110] READING NOTES: [1] The composition of Four Guillemets is structured as four "pages" (between front and back book "cover" screens). Each page refreshes at given intervals, generating fixed variants of each text. A button on the bottom of the screen also generates new (and sometimes repeat) iterations. This button allows you to accelerate the pace of the iterations. However, like time, the iterations cannot be delayed. [2] Each page has four main textual sections (with the middle two of these concatenated) plus an illustration. Each of the four sections on each page is itself constructed of four lines (each line generated from four strings). A displayed image is also selected from four variants. Each page is generated in the manner of the performance of a quartet, with each element itself drawn from four strings. The concatenated center text could also be called "stitched," like book signatures [3] The quaternary textual sections generate narratives that are connected in various semantic and logical manners. These may be narratively disruptive, grammatically continuous, non-relatively contiguous (self-contained in meaning), or paratactic (physically adjacent but open-ended in semantic connection). The narrative of Four Guillemets is immanent, that is, not only drawn from the text that is displayed, but it is articulated via underlying structure; it consists of both that which is present and that which is not displayed [4] The tetrad framing of Four Guillemets both collapses and foregrounds gaps between iterations, locations where "meaning" meets structure. Here, what is not said is as integral to the formulation as what is said. It may be compared to any composition, "an arrangement in a system to pointing," in Gertrude Stein's words. Meaning emerges through the difference between iterations. [End Page 111] «guillemets» From the digital poem, "Four Guillemets" | Performed at Digital Poetry & Dance, Feb. 1, 2013 PORTCULLUS On esplanade—a fine way to begin! On the one hand it's the equanimity of the middle way. The tranquility of water eases the reflection. It is artistic inspiration—the step, le pas, ye marble path Of close reading: film, text, and image—about close listening—close, with eyes, EAR, and heart. The syllable present at hand is the only syllable that is. As—where you are—there you are. BATTERY On black basalt rock. Not to let pile up but to let go. Plume of mist from undefinable ocean. Half Moon Battery. Victory of the echo over the voice—Castle Terrace and Old Town below. It's neither black nor white, always half-black and half-white. Silence, like the sea, is relative. A Value of what you hear and what's not here. Pleistocene flowered. Thimble Jellyfish. Shooting stars. Black shale is the dominant lithology; it contains lighter shales and interbedded limestone layers, Buddhist scrolls, willingness to be in the moment, drifting plankton thread the horizon line. Order o the Scots Leid. Each step counts. Here, there, 400 million years ago, sand petrels, wind patterns, Sleepy fleeting bears, bee landscapes, intratextual Baudelaire, fossil fragrances, scribbly gum. [End Page 112] THE WALL Floating garden scripts lily ponds in lush green vegetation. Onset of olfactory delirium through Grassmarket of elision. Argyll's Tower above characters at night—old City Wall. In Nevers ... In this way, wisteria, oxalis. Each vowel appears in one of two manners: long and short. Like...