“Man Shaving”

This week’s offering in the Found in the Public Domain special series is Winston Plowes’ “Man Shaving,” composed from words in the first paragraph of third chapter of Willa Cather’s One of Ours.

About the poem and its composition, Winston says:

“‘Man Shaving’ was generated using software to randomise the two hundred words in Cather’s original block of text.  Each stanza contains consecutive words plucked from the randomly reordered word list.  In so sparse a text I find it surprising that such a coherent and vivid image of the main character still remains.”