Hi and welcome to Week 10 of ModPo. This is our final week together. This is our third approach, our third attempt at exploring some trends in recent poetry. This one, week 10 follows somewhat as a cousin to the work that was being done by the poets in Week 9, 9.3 followers from 9.2 in that the poets in both weeks feel that there is plenty of poetic material and of language already out there in the textual ambience. So that what you get is poets feel that originality is not quite what it's cracked up to be, that there's plenty of ways of being unoriginal. Borrowing language in the ambience language that's just out there and using it in a way that for creative purposes, so one doesn't need to be original. That's the term that many of these poets like or accept on originality. These poets take the language that exists in various ways. In Week 10, Chapter 9.3, each poet has a different method for using the existing language and they vary inventively and in some cases courageously. In some cases, what they do is high-wire act. It's a hard thing to pull off what they do and it takes a lot of work. They will reuse the language that's out there. They'll rework it. They will mine it, turn it, torque it. Rearrange it, reconstitute it, write through it. Use word substitutions to remake it, to de-familiarize it and thereby to critique it. Caroline Bergvall has a poem this week called VIA, V-I-A. What VIA does is it quotes and rearranges many attempts over the decades and centuries to translate a single tercet, a single three-line stanza of Dante. Nasser Hussain in a work called SKY WRI TEI NGS, sky writings, takes the three letter airport codes from around the world and constructs poems that make sense by constraining himself to use only words that can be constructed out of the three letter airport codes. Jordan Abel, in a book called The Place of Scraps, takes the language written by a man who first in the early 20th century did an ethnography of the first peoples of Canada, of Jordan's own region and own family. Through Eurasia, that is Jordan using technique of Eurasia and some other methods. Anders the racist, well-intentioned, but racist ethnographers first eurasias. It's quite a brilliant thing to see toward enable do that. Rosmarie Waldrop, she uses the famous n plus 7 substitution, a dictionary game where you take a word that exists in the text, you look it up and then you substitute it with a word that n plus 7 is a noun. You got seven nouns down in the dictionary and you substitute it. Rosmarie Waldrop does that to the Declaration of Independence in the first lines of it. Mike McGee, who is a flarfist or was a flarfist, member of the Flarf community, does a homophonic translation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Homophonic meaning, instead of translating from one language to another, you translate what the words sound like into different words. It's like a poem made of synonyms, except the synonyms are homonyms, if that makes any sense. Erica Baum, who is a much admired photographer poet. She's a photographer who takes pictures of language. If you've ever noticed, especially in a city, but not only, just look around and the language is everywhere, not just signs. In one case, in what we are going to be studying of Erica Baum's, she went to the old library card catalog and she took photos of various arrangements, visual arrangements of the words on the tabs of the card catalogs. She is a photographer poet who never writes her own, never uses a word that she created. She simply takes pictures of words that are already out there in our world. Christian Bok, also a Canadian, writes in a very famous book called Eunoia, E-U-N-O-I-A and it's a word, maybe the only word that uses all of the vowels excluding Y of course. What Bok does is he writes chapters, prose poem chapters of this book. Each one using only words that contain only the specific vowel that he has chosen to do. We're going to be looking at, I believe the Chapter E. Every word in that chapter, each word has vowels and the only vowel is an E. Tracie Morris ends our course with a piece called African. Here what she does is she makes a sonic remix of a single, conventionally historical sentence, overview, summary sentence about the middle passage. You can see that these poets, they're very inventive, but they're not inventive at the level of the word in the sense that they don't take inspiration or imagination or intuition to come up with the word. The way we traditionally do when we write a letter or an email or many a poem and short story where each word comes from our brain or our heart. The inventiveness is not there for these poets. The inventiveness is in the process that they create. That's the creative part. That's why the word is conceptualism, coming from the world of visual arts. The idea here is that the concept, what am I going to do with this existing language? Nasser Hussain is taking airport codes and thereby constraining himself to write. Fairly I don't want say conventional but straight forward little poems about people and things. But because of the constraint, you realize that there are several things going on. There is the poet who has something to say content. Then there is the form, but the form is not a sonnet. It is just as constraining, but it is invented, the form is invented. So that's Week 10. Needless to say ModPo Plus in addition to the works in the main syllabus that I've just described is chock full of really interesting poets and also in ModPo Plus, I will point out that for Week 10, I will add that we have included a sampler of Canadian experimental poetry. A sampler that is expanding just about every month. We are really pleased to include Canadian poets in, who've had been in conversation with them.The experimental poets in the United States obviously for many decades and we're glad to feature them in the main syllabus to some degree, but also in this one special section. That's Week 10. I hope you enjoyed. There is a head note, of course at that start of this Week 10 in which I do some synthesizing. That is to say about all the poets making some generalizations. I hope you'll take a look at that and that you will really enjoy the high wire x, the inventiveness of these more or less contemporary poets.