“Address Alternate Gettysburg Lincoln’s of Reading”

James Benton created “Address Alternate Gettysburg Lincoln’s of Reading” from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, James Benton writes:

To create this poem, I alphabetized Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, then arranged the results in rough lines, looking to tease out alternative readings based on the aleatory associations of words thus rearranged. Some words, such as articles and other small words, tended to repeat without adding much substance, so without removing them altogether, I set them aside as supernumerary. I wanted to preserve the integrity of the text and its internal potential by not adding text of my own, which would tend to direct the reader to my own reading rather than allowing the resulting text to speak for itself.