Homunculus

This zine is an aleatoric sestina—a poem with six stanzas of six lines each that follows a specific order of ending words. The ending words of each line in the first stanza—numbered 1 through 6 in the diagram below—are repeated as the end words in the following stanzas’ lines, but in different orders. The structure of the poem is as follows:

123456

 615243 

364125 

532614 

451362 

246531

The poem can be read in the order presented here, or the lines may be randomized and rearranged as long as the basic structure of the poem remains intact (a “1" line should always be in its proper place within a stanza, and so on). Select a random line using a device and method of your choosing—a die will work particularly well, given its six sides—and then place it into a stanza (perhaps also chosen randomly) to create a new version of the poem.

While many sestinas contain an envoi—a final, three line section to conclude the poem—this piece intentionally omits it to preserve symmetry and facilitate the randomized aspects of the generative process. The poem is printed below both in plain text and in a color-coded format. Each line in the latter is colored according to its ending word, which is intended to aid with randomizing lines cut out of a printed copy of the zine.

An interactive digital copy of the poem is available for experimentation here: https:// briarmoro.github.io/digitaleditions/homunculus/index.html