permutation

White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a digital poem, which includes a mixture of primarily the English language with some instances of Spanish. In this work Glazier explores alternatives to our customary experiences, through the use of a generator which changes the text of the poems every 10 seconds, turning it from it’s traditional static state to one with movement and change. Furthermore, the evocation of traveling through the images and anecdotes, provides an exploration of a multilingual and multicultural experience. Additionally, the presences of the HTML code leads to a work with multiple possibilities, primarily on how the reader perceives and experiences the work due to the possible technical reading of the code and the multiple possible poetic readings.

Author description: White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a JavaScript investigation of literary variants with a new text generated every ten seconds. Its goals are as follows. (1) To present a poetic evocation of the images, vocabulary, and sights of Costa Rica's language and natural ecosystems though poetic text and visuals. (2) To investigate the potential of literary variants. Thinking of poems where authors have vacillated between variant lines, Bromeliads offers two alternatives for each line of text thus, for an 8 line poem, offering 512 possible variants, exploring the multi-textual possibilities of literary variants. (3) It explores the richness of multiple languages. (4) It mines the possibilities of translation, code, and shifting digital textuality. Having variants regenerate every ten seconds provides poems that are not static, but dynamic; indeed one never finishes reading the same poem one began reading. This re-defines the concept of the literary object and offers a more challenging reading, both for the reader and for the writer in performance, than a static poem. The idea is to be able to read as if surfing across multiple textual possibilities. Such regeneration allows traces of different languages to overwrite each other, providing a linguistic and cultural richness.

Blending Spanish and English and offering a sort of postcard prelude to each of its constantly changing stanzas, White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a poem that explores alternatives and crossings. From line to line the reader can enjoy the turns of phrase but then must figure out how to deal with their constantly turning nature. Options include waiting for the line that was being read to re-appear, re-starting from the beginning of the line that just appeared, or continuing from the middle of the word or phrase.

This 41 th kiss of love is a sonnet whose first six couplets consist, for each of their 2 verse 13 monosyllables. The poet has planned to leave to the reader the illusory care to swap them all. 

A series of sound poetry recordings for which Brion Gysin was invited to perform for the BBC radio in 1960. These permutation poems include "I Am That I Am" (1959), "which is a cyclical, randomized representation of the three words contained in that phrase." (Funkhouser 2007:39).

According to Funkhouser’s reading of Barbosa’s poem “Porto” (1977), “Porto, a city built on steep granite cliffs on the coast of Portugal, is the inspiration for the language presented and rearranged by the author for poetic effect. The output appears as a block of text of capitalized letters, and as such it has a strong visual quality. Barbosa’s program, while certainly cyclical (…) enables 40,320 permutations. (…) The addition of prepositions adds three times as many configurations and prevents the poem from reflecting a slot apparatus.” (2007: 40). “(…) the overall effect that is achieved by Barbosa’s program is that endless different phrases are built that transmit different dimensions of the same sentiment.” (41) Funkhouser considers that there is a “sense of the passage of time (…) [and] other cultural aspects of the city and its people may be read into the lines, some of which nearly defy interpretation.” (41)