Sentences
With an Afterward by Hugh Kenner
The child of the playfully perverse marriage of a 19th century grammar school book and a contemporary computer technology, Sentences is a surprising lyrical romp. The noted literary scholar and poet Charles O. Hartman discovered a book titled Sentences for Analysis and Parsing, which was used at the Thayer Street Grammar School in Providence, RI.
Hartman took this somewhat didactic text and ran it through the TRAVESTY computer program developed by Hugh Kenner and Joseph O’Rourke. Working with Kenner, Hartman then ran the result through his own DIASTEXT program, based on the “diastic” writings of poet Jackson Mac Low. The result is a wonderfully eccentric poetry that resembles something between Gertrude Stein and Surrealist automatic writing. An inspired collaboration between technology and human literacy, Sentences is an innovative delight from beginning to end.