On this episode of Arts & Letters, we talk with poet Terry Wright, whose book Graphs published by Kairos Editions in 2008 and chapbook Fractal Cut-Ups from Kattywompus Press in 2011 demonstrate the organic heuristics of mashing up data and Internet search strings to produce prose poetry.
Wright’s books and chapbooks include What the Black Box Said, Makeover, Safehouse, No More Nature and Fun and No Fun. His most recent chapbooks Graphs and Fractal Poetry are text cut-ups/mash-ups, dada-esque word collages using formulas limited to words and phrases found in text fields.
According to author David Schneiderman, "Terry Wright's Graphs takes the paradigm of data presentation from a hundred thousand American boardrooms and corporate meeting spaces and unmakes it back into its lowly constituent elements: words."
Thank you to Rural War Room who wrote the score and supplied the music, mash ups, and general mayhem for the show.
Support for this program was provided by the Arkansas Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.