Ron Starr lives and writes in Seattle. He is an editor at Floating Bridge Press. This spring Ravenna Press is publishing his Oulipian-inspired chapbook.
Notes: “The People, Like Sand, and the Stars” combines Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” with Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far, nor In Deep.” The poems were broken into phrases. The phrases were put, in order, in an eight by eight grid. Phrases were then read from the grid by following a knight’s tour.
“Barbie’s Little Love Notes” is a combinatorial work inspired by Bernard Magné’s description of Perec’s Deux cent quarante-trois cartes postales en couleurs véritables. The love notes have twenty-seven possible structures that are filled in with material from six lists. Magic squares were used to determine the order of the structures and lists.