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Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Nighthawk, Part 1: Use of Additive Sequences for Generating a Cut-up Poem
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In 1973, I was a post-graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, working on my Master’s degree in music composition. My principle teacher at the time was Kenneth Gaburo, well known for his work in compositional linguistics which crossed boundaries between music, language, writing, performance, and dance. I was also very good friends with two fellow post-graduate students, Peter Gordon, composer, and Kathy Acker, writer, who at the time were partners. Kathy was mainly working with the performance poet David Antin at the time. Many were the late-night trips to VG’s Donut Shop in Carlsbad, California, in which Peter, Kathy and I discussed artistic issues that seemed quite urgent to us at the time. William S Burroughs, with his cut-up method, and the collage poetics of John Cage were both enormously influential on us, and Kathy introduced me to the work of Jackson Mac Low, who, many years later, I became friends with. And, as mentioned, both Gaburo’s and Antin’s experiments with language-based composition were very important to us.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Cordite Poetry Review Mathematics vol. 83 November 2017 12169361 2017 periodical issue

    'I was already quite a few years into a creative writing PhD titled ‘Generic Engineering’ and flailing around quite spectacularly in a galaxy of words when an academic friend, perhaps hoping to spare me the indignity of a completed thesis and potential employment, flipped to the middle of the 526-page book he was reading. Wordlessly, pointed to a single sentence. ‘Due to a predilection whose origin I will leave it up to the reader to determine,’ it read, ‘I will choose the symbol ♀ for this inscription.’ The symbol had been summoned to designate what the writer called ‘generic multiple’. The generic, the writer noted, is ‘the adjective retained by mathematicians to designate the indiscernible, the absolutely indeterminate’. Another PhD student who was in the room sniggered, disparagingly, I thought, as if dubious that I could be capable of understanding what had been read aloud. In retrospect it was more likely a beleaguered exhalation, a stockpile for the future, of sympathy and despair.' (Editorial)

    2017
Last amended 1 Nov 2017 15:18:40
http://cordite.org.au/essays/nighthawks/ Nighthawk, Part 1: Use of Additive Sequences for Generating a Cut-up Poemsmall AustLit logo Cordite Poetry Review
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