Broken Powers

I have a piece in the latest edition of Black Cat’s Typo periodical. It is based on an idea I had when I was a student many years ago and deeply involved in folk music.

The article – The Combinatronics of the Broken Token Ballad – attempts to do for folk music what Raymond Queneau did for the sonnet with his Cent Mille
Milliards de Poèmes or A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. In one of his first projects for OULIPO Queneau wrote 10 sonnets of 10 lines with the same rhymes and put them in a book with the pages cut up so you could combine lines from different poems. This gave the total potential poems as a hundred thousand billion.

I previously attempted a similar but smaller feat by creating five limericks with the same rhymes which could be combined into 625 combinations. The broken token version combines a potential 20 ballads of 20 lines each into a similarly large number (I didn’t write the ballads because life is too short).

For those not familiar with broken token ballads, a young couple separate when one goes to war and break a coin or other love token which they can combine when the war is over. The fact war was hell in the past is evidenced by the suggestion it is the only way they would recognise each other. It is just one of the separated lovers folk songs including versions where the left behind lover joins up in disguise to pursue their partner. Traditionally the person to go to war is the man and the woman cross dresses to join them. These were the days before sexual equality and gay relationships were mentioned in songs, although sex between men or women and transformed seals or other supernatural creatures were quite common.

All of Black Scat’s publications are worth seeking out so go to their website.