Hello, welcome to Week 9 of ModPo. I am very excited about Week 9. I love this stuff. It's challenging for many people, but I think ultimately very satisfying and very interesting anyway. That is a week about chance generated poetry. Chance poetry. Poetry written by chance. Aleatory writing, A-L-E-A-T-O-R-Y, aleatory writing, poems made by non-intentional or quasi non-intentional chance operations. Now there is a 16-minute audio intro and transcript of that intro that if I may say so myself is I think the best of these audio intros. It's partly cheerleading the way I cheer lead in the stain week at the beginning of the stain weak. Partly, I think a fairly coherent survey of why and what in the realm of chance generated poetry aleaotry poetry, there's also a head note, of course, as there is every week. I urge you to read that. Listen to the audio intro or read the transcript and then read the head note and you'll be ready. Now mainly what we're trying to do this week is to encourage you to ask two really weird questions. One, why would anybody write a poem through means other than imagination, inspiration, spontaneous feeling, using words that you choose and intend. Why would anybody write a poem through means other than that? The second question we want you to ask is, can a poem written in that mode, in that spirit be beautiful or be said to be beautiful. This is a question that John Cage wants us to ask. What do we mean when we say something is not beautiful? Let's talk very briefly about what the artists were going to meet this week John Cage, who is known as a theorist of music and a musician, experimental to say the least, was also something of a poet and he wrote a poem called Writing through Howl. The whole concept of writing through is interesting. You take a document, a text, an existing text like Howl, which is great choice for us for ModPo because we've already talked about Howl in Week 6. Back in Week 6, Allen Ginsberg's Howl. John Cage writes a poem in which he uses a special, process, a procedure for determining or quasi determining the words he takes from the existing text. You have Writing through Howl and then Howl you can compare the two. John Cage. Then we turn to a poet writer, aleatory poet. He did a lot of other things as well like Cage in this respect, Jackson Mac Low and more or less a contemporary, maybe just a little younger, who is represented here by two poems, a vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore and a chance operations rewriting of Gertrude Stein, also one of those ModPo things where we look back to an earlier poet in an earlier week to see what the more contemporary writers are doing with those classics as it were. A vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore is an elegy and other one of those ModPo themes. How do you experimentally mourn the loss of a friend, a colleague? Peter Innisfree Moore was part of the scene. The downtown Avant garde scene Macklow was part of downtown Manhattan in New York City. Moore was in fact a documenter of the scene. He was a photographer and Macklow takes the letters from Moore's name. Peter Innisfree Moore and he creates a dance script score, performance instruction and he and others performed it several times. That's what vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore is. The chance for rewriting a stainous of a parallel to Cage's rewriting of how. Next is Jena Osman Dropping Leaflets. Just, an amazing poem in response to the Iraq War. I'll leave it to you to figure out what Osman is doing there. She's taking the the ambient noise of words spoken by officials of the Bush administration during the start of that war. She mixes it all up using a chance operations technique which is much less systematic than Macklow or Cage. She takes some transcripts of these statements made by government officials and journalists covering the official statements made about the war and the reasons for the war, and then she bombards her academic office with paper containing those transcripts and then she takes it from there. Two more pieces this week. Bernadette Mayer returns. We meet Mayer in the New York school poets week as a second generation New York School poet. She's back this week because she is very interested in teaching students how to think of themselves as writers and creators, how to think of themselves as poets. She creates a list of writing experiments that really was meant to share with her students and many, many, many people, including myself, have taught our courses based on the writing experiment ideas. Bernadette Mayer and this will be the basis for some of you who write essay number 4 in ModPo. You have two options, which I'll explain in a minute. Finally, Joan Retallack, who really probably belongs in Week 10. But I love the fact that she's in Week 9. She is first of all, a disciple. That's probably not the right word, but a follower, someone who really revered John Cage. She's Cagean. She creates an ethical Cage it was already very ethical, but an ethical version of what Cage is doing. She creates a poem called Not A Cage. The fact that Cage is in there and she's Cagean is an accident. Well she did it. She discarded a bunch of books from her library and she took first and last lines from the books she was discarding and created a poem called Not A Cage. That's Week 9 it's very exciting. I love this stuff. As you can tell. One word about essay number 4. Those of you who will be writing the fourth essay, are really going to be choosing between two assignments. One is to do one of that Bernadette Mayer's experiments and create a poem. The other is to do a mesostic based on what John Cage does to Allen Ginsberg. That is Week 9. Enjoy it and if you're confused or intrigued by what I've just said in this video introduction, make sure you listen to the audio introduction to follow.