Diastic Reading

Diastic reading is an arbitrary but not random way of selecting words from one text to create a new text. A key phrase (Mac Low calls it a "title phrase") guides the selection of words. Let's say that the key phrase is "red balloon." Starting at the beginning of the text, we would select the first word that began with an "r"--the first letter of the first keyword. Then, we'd continue from where we stopped in the text until we found a word that had an "e" as its second letter (the second letter of the keyword). Continuing, we'd look for a word that had a "d" as the third letter. Next, we'd look for a word that had a "b" as its first letter (the first letter of the second keyword). If at any point we reach the end of the text, we go back and continue from the beginning. When a word is followed by a punctuation mark or ends a line in the source text, the line ends in the generated text. For more information, see Jackson Mac Low, The Virginia Woolf Poems (Providence: Burning Deck, 1985), n.p.; and Charles O. Hartman, The Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), pp. 95-96. Use the back button or click here to go back.

Last updated 2 July 1999.