Chris Arnold & David Thomas Henry Wright
Kirill Azernyy & Ted Warnell
Sotiri Bakagiannis
Angela Chang
Liza Daly
A. Pedro Fernandes
Leonardo Flores
Claude Heiland-Allen
Chris Joseph
Nabil Kashyap
Nathan Mifsud
Jason Nelson
Allison Parrish
Scott Rettberg
Mark Sample
Richard Snyder
Daniel Temkin
Helen Shewolfe Tseng
Andy Wallace
Mark Wolff
Ivan Zhao
¡wénrán zhào!
This 10-centric issue features 23 remarkable works: Not a truly odd number, because that’s 10 in trivigesimal. There are not just numerical abstactions, but projects about loss (a father’s death felt through rhymes of folklore), politics (perspectives on Puerto Rican statehood) and existence (the ways we ponder whether it makes sense). As is often the case, some of these computational poems render the textual as differently visual, for instance, presenting a color-coded Quenueau-like arrangement. Converting measurement units may seem sterile, but it’s actually cultural communication, not to mention an aesthetic and inviting process. Be sure, too, to see how a moving homage doubles down on and transmutes Charles Demuth’s The Figure 5 in Gold.
Play the puzzling game of linear and exponential growth, trying to figure out the code. That might tax mind and eye, but if you feel your “digits” aren’t getting enough of a workout, tell it to the hand, which, by the way, will be aching after moving the mouse wheel ever forward to read ever deeper. To give it a rest, just watch the rain fall from 10 (heaven/sky), let the browser do the zooming, or trace through a spiral story you can wind in different ways.
There’s a generated poem with every word inTENse, and, even more severe, two that deal with writing as discipline: In one case, it’s worse than being slapped with a wet noodle, in the other, a self-imposed self-improvement routine that breaks down. If you want to follow the bouncing ball, you’ll need to write univocalic phrases, and it wouldn’t hurt to maintain a poker face. Text in a tower of powers, generated by silicon, computes the number of the sand. If you prefer something edible, the obsessed can classify oatmeal in 10,000 ways. Two of fortune’s wheels spin here, one forming phrases, the other scattering words in star charts. Conjunctions between historical events are presented with the accompaniment of sound, briefly buzzing or (if you prefer) painfully prolonged.
Each of the poems in Taper #10 is licensed as free software for you to use, study, modify, and share however you like.