Poetry News

Jared Nielsen Programs Gertrude Stein’s a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose… (You Get the Picture)

By Harriet Staff

Thanks to Post Position for sending up this gritty ditty by Jared Nielsen, based on a Gertrude Stein fragment.

Jared Nielsen, thanks to his schooling in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, his ability as a programmer, and his recent creation of a puppet, has developed an amazing conflation of Gertrude Stein, the Python programming language, and the Wonder Showzen episode “Patience.”

Nielsen has been recreating famous American poems in Python or so that they are about Python, as in “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “Song of Myself.”

His project parallels that of Páll Thayer along two dimensions: Thayer, in his series Microcodes, presents short programs in Perl (not Python) that often recreate famous artworks (not poems), for instance Vito Acconci’s Seedbed and Jasper Johns’s Flag.

We must admit, however, that Thayer does not employ a puppet named after Larry Wall.

The original poem can be found here.

Now watch, and listen for the loop.

Tags: Gertrude Stein, Jared Nielsen, Post Position
Posted in Poetry News on Wednesday, January 9th, 2013 by Harriet Staff.