whair dya go, or: a (r)explanetary (r)afterworld

by Franco Cortese

gó go gó begins with a variant of something I call an emop: a densely multilingual lipogram consisting of words sourced from a wide variety of languages, which share some invariant aspect of form (in this case, two-letter words in the key of “o”), arranged in alphabetical order (in this case, according to the vowel or consonant they begin with).

The second textual poem is that lipogram’s translation, consisting of the verbatim literal English translations and/or technical or grammatical definitions as listed by my principle sources. These translations and definitions are unedited and untruncated, and any discrepancy in enjambment is due to the use of literal English translations and definitions with internal punctuation.

The textual poems that follow are part evocatively garbed translation, part found sound poem, and in rare instances, part fledgingly-concrete poem. They were generated by taking the multilingual lipogram that begins the project, pasting it into Google Translate, selecting a specific language setting, and blindly accepting the raw and unedited output.

The image quartets complimartmentizing each textual poem are also found, and were created by using the textual poem preceding them into an open-source deep learning image engine that generates images based on an analysis of input text. Because the engine interprets the input text in a different manner each time, these image quartets are the hand-picked results of several dozens of iterations. The front and back cover images were generated by using this chapbook’s title as the input text.

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gó go gó is out of print from The Blasted Tree Store

Featured by The Blasted Tree: June 26, 2020


Franco Cortese

Contributing Author

Other works on The Blasted Tree:


gó go gó by Franco Cortese is a Blasted Tree original collection of poetry.

ISBN [Digital]: 978-1-987906-59-2

Cover Design by Kyle Flemmer

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