View Full Size Sonnagrams 1-20
by K. Silem Mohammad
(LPCB028) - 7 1/4"x7 1/4" - 28 pages - Three Color Hand silkscreened Cover

The first installment of K. Silem Mohammad's anagrammatic manipulations of Shakespeare that tell us, among other things, that "Richard Nixon screwed a giant squid," and that there is "a word the OED omits," and "Whoever says it retches, dies, and shits." This one's a killer!

$6.00

Reviews

A beautiful chapbook designed by Slack Buddha Press out of Cincinnati...Mohammad recycles all the letters in 20 Shakespeare sonnets into remarkably lively containers of hysterical language... ...Mohammad is part of, depending on who you talk to, the hopelessly nostalgic, innovative, avant-garde, dull, pseudo-Dada, naughtified Mac Low, Burroughs-lite 'collective' known as Flarf, whose members include writers like Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Drew Gardner, and Michael Magee...so it's no surprise to learn that these sonnets were composed via a somewhat chance-determined procedure...Mohammad describes the process as follows: 'I feed Shakespeare's sonnets one line at a time into an anagram engine, thus generating a new group of words from each line, which I then paste into a Microsoft Word document. This initial textual output gives me a bank of raw material that is quantitatively equivalent to Shakespeare's poem at the most basic linguistic level: the letter. At the same time,it sufficiently alters the lexical structure of the original poem so that I am not overtly influenced by Shakespeare's semantic content. I click and drag the text generated by the anagram engine letter by letter until I am able to rework it into a new sonnet in iambic pentameter, with the English rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The letters that are inevitably left over are used to make a title.' What results from this exercise is very clever, often moving and always funny...themes do develop, oddly enough...like the 'originals', sexual desire, frustration, and prowess are declaimed in any number of curious ways...the tension and interplay between 'high' and 'low' art is evoked by references to, say, Juggs magazine alongside 'Newtonian shadows'...Ultimately, though, perhaps the greatest gift this book offers is its ability to make the reader feel that language is one of the most fresh, interesting, and plastic materials out there from which to make art. This book was a real pleasure to read... from Noriyuko 'Pat' at Good Reads

Interviews with K. Silem Mohammad about Sonnagrams

With Luke Degnan from BOMBLOG