On a sunny afternoon this past November I met experimental poet Hannes Bajohr in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We both read from our new books to a crowd of people on folding chairs wearing big jackets and face masks. Behind us, birds flew in and out of a thick wall of ivy. Bajohr had the audience falling out of their seats with laughter, which is not something one expects from the author of a machine-generated book of poetry. Bajohr’s Blanks carries out a number of different computational experiments to extract poetic material from many different text sources, from amateur erotic stories to German management guides. His poems are all worth careful consideration, but my absolute favorite is “Monologue,” created from Dan Savage’s “Savage Love” sex advice columns. Here’s how the poem begins:

I’m a 24-year-old straight male and I’m unattractive, and I’m

pregnant, and I’m a big fat liar, so I’m at a loss, Dan, but I’m

innocent, and I’m not sure how that works exactly, yet I’m effing

scared, and I’m rare, I know, but I exist, and I’m fine with this...

If this alone does not convince you to get your hands on the book as soon as possible, consider the possibilities of a poem made from all the sentences with the word “kill” extracted from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Here’s how that poem begins:

A toad is in the well beneath a stone; you must find it and kill it,

and the well will again give wine in plenty. Alas, poor child, thou

hast got into a murderer’s den, thy bridegroom does live here, but

he will hew thee in pieces, and kill thee...

Those are just some of the ways this book dazzles and challenges the reader. The computational methods employed by this book invite you to re-think established notions of reading and poetics. Poetry is everywhere. After reading this book, you might start to see poems in every text you encounter.

Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.

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