More sestinas than there are particles in the known universe

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Last summer I volunteered to be a driver for the U of A Poetry Center’s Poetry Off the Page Symposium. I was assigned to the poet Dan Waber and his wife Jennifer Hill.

I looked Waber up before I picked him and his wife at Tucson International. I discovered that he runs a nonprofit chapbook publishing website, is the author of several books of poetry, publishes a visual poetry series, and is generally a mad scientist when it comes to digital and concrete poetry.

But perhaps the coolest thing he’s done – in both my and his own opinion – is write more sestinas than there are particles in the known universe. That is to say, he’s written an algorithm (in the form of some perl code) that has generated more sestinas than there are particles in the known universe.

To be specific, 9.103 x 10¹³¹ sestinas.

A sestina is a 39-line form (6 sestets and an ending tercet) that involves an intricate pattern of repeated words.

All 9.103 x 10¹³¹ of Waber’s sestinas use the same 6 words as line-ending words. All of them use the same fragments of language, repeated and recombined in an unimaginably huge number of iterations.

It’s hard for be to break down exactly why I love this project so much. Like all good poetry (and good art) it works in multiple dimensions.

The sestina, because of its kind of bizarre pattern of repeated words, is a great form for talking about unresolvable problems. You have this echo of words that seem to spiral around a central knot. As Waber puts it: “A sestina feels to me like a fall through a system of cycles.” (You’ve really got to read a few sestinas to see what I mean: Heaney, Bishop, Auden).

What’s brilliant about Waber’s project is that it takes the effect of a single sestina – that circular dance of repeated words – and hyperbolizes it beyond belief. I own ten of the sestinas. Obviously he hasn’t physically – or even digitally – published them all (physically, you’d have to deforest large sections of the planet in order to produce the paper to do that; I am less sure of what the task of digitally producing them all would involve); you have to custom order a specified number directly from his website, though mine I received as a gift after being his driver. I like this too, because it brings in an element of audience participation. Sure, it’s not quite as much involvement as some of the pieces we’ve discussed in class, but the reader must still decide how many sestinas they would like (the more you order, the better you’ll grok the whole thing – but the more work you have to do, as reading each sestina is itself a project). And then you have to personally contact Waber to request the sestinas.

So what do you get if you order a selection?

Just as in a single sestina, the same six words repeat throughout the poem, in Waber’s collection of sestinas, the same fragments of phrases repeat to make up all 9.103 x 10¹³¹ poems. He somehow managed to perfect the code so that it randomly recombines his fragments and still always makes grammatical sense.

So all 9.103 x 10¹³¹ sestinas are alike but different. All of them follow a slightly different orbit around a nuclear experience or truth or emotion. The more of them you read, the more the language enacts the experience it’s trying to convey. That is, one thing that we (poetry students; I’m a creative writing major with an emphasis in poetry) learn is important in poetry writing is to think about how our form must enact, must enforce, must essentially be inseparable from content. So Waber is writing about a time in his life when he is frustratingly caught going back and forth between worlds; where he is constantly approaching and then leaving where he wants to be; where the routine that he’s following both confines and defines him.

That’s exactly the set form of a sestina does for a poet; it both constrains and articulates meaning. 

Waber's sestinas are successful because they are not just the result of a gimick. He didn't just do to prove he could write computer code that generates poetry. He did it because he realized that by writing code that generates poetry, he could express something about life in a unique and powerful way.

I should mention, too, that all of them are love poems.