The Days Left Forebodings and Water
NaNoGenMo 2016 still has a couple of days left to run, but there are already quite a few finished novels. Like this example of blackout poetry from Liza Daly.
“The Days Left Forebodings and Water” is based on a redaction of
Mary Wollstonecraft, via Liza Daly’s Blackout tool.
While there have been blackout NaNoGenMo entires before, “The Days Left Forebodings and Water” has a very high level of artistry: it works on the image of the text, identifies words that match the parts of speech that fit the sentence pattern that it is looking for, and scribbles dynamically and aesthetically to cover the rest of the page.
The result combines the virtue of Oulipoian procedures that bring out the underlying meaning of a text by performing a process on it with the similar effect of blackout poetry. The machine understands the function of the words, but relies on the original text for their meaning, bringing out poetry that was there all along but no human could have seen.
In addition to being an arresting work in its own right, this generated novel reminds us that sometimes we can create new things by taking things away, rather than constructing them. Elision is a powerful tool, and sometimes what isn’t there can be more powerful than what is.