Poesia Povera ─ 削ぎ落とされた詩

In “Regular Expressions as a System of Poetic Notation” (2008), the American poet Dan Waber declared: “Words fail.” This is not a failure of communication but an ontological failure. Experience and sensation are multidimensional, simultaneous, ambiguous, and contradictory. Language, by contrast, arranges signs sequentially, one word and one sentence at a time. It reduces the richness of experience to a sequential string of characters. This failure of language has been one of the driving forces of poetry. Poetry has expanded not only by refining, rearranging, and inventing words, but also by turning letters into figures, spatializing language, and making language increasingly parallel and distributed.
Regular expressions use metacharacters to describe patterns in strings for searching, replacing, and extracting text. They can inscribe multiple possibilities simultaneously within a single sequence of symbols. The regular expression li[sf]t, which can match both list and lift, superimposes the two words. In this sense, regular expressions partially loosen the constraint of language that permits us to say only one thing at a time.
The metacharacters of regular expressions correspond to poetic techniques. Alternation, |, transforms Jakobson’s paradigmatic axis into the syntagmatic axis. The quantifiers ?, *, and + correspond to repetition and refrain, while the backreference \1 corresponds to anaphora and rhyme. Expressions such as ^, $, and (?!…), which specify conditions, direct the course of execution. Regular expressions thus shift from a means of specifying search conditions to a system of poetic notation.
The work composes poetry by following the process of measurement-based quantum computation. Its computational resource, corresponding to a quantum cluster, consists of public-domain works from Aozora Bunko. A work is selected at random, and a poem written as a regular expression is applied to it as a measurement basis. The fragments of text that it captures are displayed and read aloud in electronic speech. The captured words are then substituted into the next basis, altering what will be measured next. Just as measurement itself constitutes computation in measurement-based quantum computation, reading becomes, in itself, an act of writing.
Five regular-expression poems have been prepared. Throughout the exhibition, these poems serve as trawling nets, ceaselessly dragged through the sea of Aozora Bunko.

Flicker Score (meimetsu.regex) — Kenji Miyazawa
Nonwar Score (hisen.regex) — Akiko Yosano
The Fact of Anarchy (museifu.regex) — Noe Itō
Slime Mold Score (nenkin.regex) — Kumagusu Minakata
Science and Art Score (kagakugeijutsu.regex) — Torahiko Terada and Ukichiro Nakaya

Gustav Metzger’s Auto-Destructive Art contains within the work itself the agents of its own destruction. The work disintegrates within a finite period of time, and once its destruction is complete, its remains are removed from the site. This work likewise corrodes with every fragment it cuts away from its resources, as though another drop of acid had fallen upon it. A work that has matched any of the five poems is entered into a register of consumed works and can never again be used as a resource for poetic composition. Once all resources have been exhausted, the register and the state of corrosion are reset, and the next generation begins.


Execution Example: Nonwar Score

To examine you closely

my younger brother

even our parents, I wish, would refrain
Night will soon come


toward spring

innately, without shame

life

Thou shalt not

Even if you are staying there

having lost his two beloved children at Port Arthur

the parent

All who understand the value of culture

because of the spring wind

your lordship’s eyes, perhaps

the act of serving you, unfin—

thou shalt not

Away from your side

among the forces besieging Port Arthur

a dear memory was

I am thinking that

it was early spring

a love story, exceedingly

the beloved landscape is Enshū

unlike “thou shalt not,” this