Mesostics

Regular Mesostic. Standard form.

Merce Cunningham Mesostic. Mesostic form that John Cage used for a set of mesostics he wrote for Merce Cunningham.

Cantos Mesostic. Mesostic form that John Cage used once when writing through Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

The late American composer John Cage pioneered a form of writing poetry called Mesostics. In it you would have a poem with a word running down the middle called the spine. This spine would be in all caps while the rest of the letters would be in lower case. This spine would often be the point of the poem or a person to whom it was dedicated. The words surrounding the spine word are called wing words.

As time went on Cage began to use mesostics as a means to write through other texts. He would choose a longer work like a book that would be the source. Then using various rules he would search that text for words containing the next letter of his chosen spine keeping some of the words on either side (based on other rules). This would result in a poem made up of fragments of the source text with the subject of the poem in the form of the spine.

Eventually he automated much of the process through the use of computer programs written for him by other people.

This Style Algorithm emulates his methods. First you choose a spine. This is the subject of your poem. For the examples above we use “John Cage”.

Next you choose a source text. We have a number available but more can be added. The one used for these examples is Thoreau’s Walden.

After this are a number of options. The rule option allows for the choice of 100%, 50%, or 0% rule. The first one does not allow for any words to be used in the mesostic if it contains a spine letter from either the previous spine or the following one. The second one allows for words that have the next spine letter but not the previous one. The last one makes no restrictions.

The word rule either starts searching for spine words starting at a random spot in the source text or works in a linear manner starting from the beginning of the source text.

The wing words option will either choose a random number of words to retain starting from the spine word and working out if you choose the surrounding option or will use all available words if you choose the neither option. The software also follows Cage’s rule of only allowing up to 45 characters on either side of the spine word.

With the punctuation rule you can choose yes which breaks the wing words at punctuation marks. The no option allows for punctuation marks to be used in the wing words.

The bold option if set to yes will print the spine letters in bold face (along with being capitalized). If set to no then they are just capitalized.

Finally, there are three styles of printing out the resulting mesostic. The standard style is regular and follows the formatting Cage used most often. The merce style is a style Cage used for a set of mesostics he wrote for Merce Cunningham. In this style the size and font used for each letter in the mesostic is set at random. The cantos style was used when Cage used Ezra Pound’s Cantos for a source text. Each mesostic was printed on its own line and right justified.