Sonnagram 87
Hmmmmmm, Twenty TV Ghost Goths Have Got How High, God?
K. Silem Mohammad
If Andrew Johnson wasn’t such a dick,
The North might well have tamed the Southern beast;
Belle and Sebastian wouldn’t make me sick
If Tigermilk had never been released.
If irony weren’t stanky–hear me out–
Then all that’s indeterminate, or foggy,
Or cast into anachronistic doubt,
Would wither on the weathervane (whoa doggy).
If manga figurines are what you grok,
Or goofy mauve giraffes, or shitty trees,
Or Katy Perry sitting in a wok,
I guess you’re into things that might got fleas.
If ping pong Aristophanes is best,
Then tennis Gandhi puts him to the test.
__________
Sonnet 87 (“Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing”)
My process for composing sonnagrams is as follows: I feed one of Shakespeare’s sonnets into an internet anagram engine, generating fourteen lines of text that is quantitatively equivalent to Shakespeare’s poem at the level of the letter. I then rearrange this text, clicking and dragging letter by letter until I have a new English sonnet. All leftover letters are used to make up a title.
Hmmmmmm, Twenty TV Ghost Goths Have Got How High, God?
K. Silem Mohammad
If Andrew Johnson wasn’t such a dick,
The North might well have tamed the Southern beast;
Belle and Sebastian wouldn’t make me sick
If Tigermilk had never been released.
If irony weren’t stanky–hear me out–
Then all that’s indeterminate, or foggy,
Or cast into anachronistic doubt,
Would wither on the weathervane (whoa doggy).
If manga figurines are what you grok,
Or goofy mauve giraffes, or shitty trees,
Or Katy Perry sitting in a wok,
I guess you’re into things that might got fleas.
If ping pong Aristophanes is best,
Then tennis Gandhi puts him to the test.
__________
Sonnet 87 (“Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing”)
My process for composing sonnagrams is as follows: I feed one of Shakespeare’s sonnets into an internet anagram engine, generating fourteen lines of text that is quantitatively equivalent to Shakespeare’s poem at the level of the letter. I then rearrange this text, clicking and dragging letter by letter until I have a new English sonnet. All leftover letters are used to make up a title.