tender buttons, the text

reading tender buttons, and being around so many people reading it, and all of us struggling with it, trying to milk meaning from it that we can understand, and collectively being unsuccessful... these things made me want to think about new ways to look at her poetry. her grammar is so ambiguous, her syntax so unfamiliar. i decided to analyze the grammar she uses, to reveal the repetitive structures of her phrasings. i built a graph in which to plot her words by parts of speech. (remember parts of speech? i've been relearning all my grammar...)

my first graph looked like this:

it did the job, and was easy enough to read across each row and then down to the next, but it certainly wasn't much to look at. next, i ran my parts of speech up the y-axis rather than across the x.

this, i think, looks much more lyrical. it reads across left to right, without regard to up/down variation. your eyes, then, are zigzagging down and up between every word.

seeing a long string of this text, and the way that sliding vertical bar helps to decode the order of the words, reminded me of rotating music box cylinders, studded with little note-bumps to strike the tines of  the comb to make a melody. kinda like this:

which helped me decide that the aesthetics of my book should be charged with the idea of the music box! which means i'm constructing a box to house my book, and maybe including a comb-piece to drag across the words if reading across is difficult.