I really like the quote, from Hartley's piece, in which Mac Low says that he thinks of his poems as concrete, not abstract. In fact, because the poems function in the realm of conceptual rather than thematic complexity, there is something more fundamentally (mathematically) concrete about them. The average poetry reader, however, will seek meaning in the text rather than the method used to generate the text, and will therefore likely find the lack of a message in the actual textual body disorienting, or less concrete. Of course, as Hartley suggests, because the poems use words and phonemes -- the fundamental building blocks of language -- it is only natural that they produce some sort of meaning. However, Mac Low is pushing us, as readers, away from the natural impulse to ascribe this meaning to an authorial figure. In this sense, his work is a direct, primary-textual exploration of the poststructuralist concept of the death of the author (see Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, etc.).

This was my first attempt to step out of the confines of Processing and into the scary world of Java. I had a lot of trouble getting anything to work at first, but after a few hours of puzzling through error messages I finally started to figure things out. I also looked at Christian's program, which provided a lot of guidance. In any case, I hope my code isn't too much of a mess!

This version of the program merely generates a text file (or files) that can be used as the basis for a performance of the piece. Eventually, I hope to create a version of the program that generates audio.

REFERENCES:

HomageProgram.java
PoemWords.java
WordFinder.java

Joseph Byrd: Homage to Jackson Mac Low

Sample Output