THE POEM

i was reading the story of stories of stories by Robert Viscusi

(ellis island 1.3)

i was reading the story of stories of stories

they tell on the walls of ellis island

the stories disintegrate you like waves

they break you into a thousand thousand faces

looking out at the skyline from the ships

which of them do you become

you flutter across the stories like a wave

you are the change of shadow on the stories of stories

and the soft backwash of tiny waves on the narrow beach

you are not a story but an aspect of a story’s story

and though you had expected a more substantial career

you appreciate the lightning swiftness of your influence

you are the eyes that transform the city

giving it the softness of napoli

“ellis island” by robert viscusi

(vol I libri 1-4 + dvd engl-ita)

transposition sandro sardella

published by abrigliasciolta 23.03.10

Ellis Island is a poem in 52 books, with 12 sonnets in each book.
Each book has as many lines as a week has hours. The whole of Ellis Island has as many lines as there are hours in 364 days.
The “stable” text of the poem is printed on paper. This text is as fixed in place as a trolley track or an imperial capital.
There is also a constantly shifting text that subsists in a digital database and sleeps in the shadow of the Random Sonnet Generator at ellisislandpoem.com.
The appearance of this text is as hard to predict as the shifts in the wind on the bay.
In the Random Sonnet Generator the lines migrate freely. They can do so because each line of the written poem is a separate event, its own hour.
There are 1,357,013,773,011,244,426,399,457,416,598,180,069,376 possible sonnets at ellisislandpoem.com

New York. Ellis Island. Photo courtesy of Rocco Saltino

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