Daphnomancy

by Michelle Detorie

chapbook published by Peter Ganick's Small Chapbook Project

These poems are improvisations from DAPHNOMANCY*, a collaborative music and text project with guitarist Kurt Newman.

Hollow body electric guitar, FX, amplifier, ViaVoice voice recognition software, laptop computer, projector.

Voice recognition software is fed a signal from Kurt's guitar amplifier and generates text from the sounds of the guitar. The text is broken, amended, and in other ways altered by Michelle.

*Daphnomancy is an ancient method of divination using a branch from a Laurel tree. A Laurel branch is thrown into a fire and a question is asked. If the branch crackles in burning it is a positive sign. If the branch burns without doing so it is a negative sign.

Genres: Poetry

chapbook

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Michelle Detorie is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). Her first full-length collection, After-Cave, was published by Ahsahta Press in September, 2014. Her current project, The Sin in Wilderness, is a book-length erasure poem about love, animals, and affective geography. In 2007, Michelle was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, and in 2010 she won a direct-to-artist grant from the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative for her public art project, The Poetry Booth. She lives in Santa Barbara, CA, where she writes, teaches, and edits Hex Presse . She is also the poetry editor at Entropy (entropymag.org).