Rawson Thurber's project involved a fractal deconstruction similar to the Cantoring of music. |
The subject was a fragment of Alan Ginsberg's poem Howl. |
Middle thirds were removed, from stanzas, to clusters of lines, to lines, to clusters of words in a line, to individual words. |
Ginsberdg's fluid, angry style turned out to be well-suited to this kind of analysis: the various Cantor set fragments still read well, and preserve at least some of the feeling of the whole poem. |
In a deeper sense than the repetition of word patterns, perhaps Ginsberg's poem exhibits a natural fractal structure through the repetition of ideas across several scales. |