Plus |Week| End
1
The week
ends
2
Week
End Week
end week end
weekly every
The be the
send by
by Week-
end be entry
end by
by the new
Next
week
3
Week
end best
bets the
week
end
4
by NFL
event the week
end best
bets
Univocal Sonic Map
Poems were constructed from numerous articles in Seattle Times 10 April 2014 Print Replica.
Note on composition and process:
These poems were experiments with the Oulipean form of univocalism, which, similar to the tautogram, employs a focus on a single letter, in this case, a vowel. In particular the idea is only to use words that do not contain the vowels excluded, such that a univocal “a” poem would not include any words with e’s, i’s, o’s, or u’s. Be sure to check out the Found Poetry Review’s blog for the official prompt and links to read other fantastic poets’ responses.
As per my usual, I started with the print Replica of today’s Seattle Times, extracted all the text into Word, stripped the formatting, eliminated most punctuation, symbols and numerals, and separated the bulk according to the papers pagination. I then ran each page through Doug Luman’s Ouliposcript engine. He added a new setting for the univocalism exercise, so I simply assigned a vowel per section since there were five sections. Section A– Nation/World/Opinion, of course were the a’s; the local/regional news(section B), the i’s; the sports (section C), the o’s; the auto insert (section D), the u’s; and the Weekend Plus insert (section E), of course, the e’s. None of this took very long, and it produced little sonic maps of each page, some of which were somewhat poetic on their own, like the “Options” piece above.
I made the most headway on section E, since the repetition of “weekend” allowed for easy sequencing, so I posted those for now. I should be able to go back to these early next month and pull out a handful of gems from the rough text, so I’m pretty pleased with the output for today, and for the first 11 days as a whole, as I likely already have enough poems for a decent chapbook-length manuscript. And there’s still 19 more days left!
Ouliposting 