“The Google Sonnets”

“The Google Sonnets” by Dig Chase have appeared on the web between February 27 and March 7.  Only they are not sonnets.  The first poem does have fourteen lines, but due to the way it is posted looks like it has sixteen.  The others are longer.

Posted by Greg Perry, who appears to be Chase, the Google-searched poems appear both on The Google Sonnets: The Collected Searches Arranged in Verses by Dig Chase and on grapez, Greg’s daily blog.  At the time of this writing, eight poems have been posted—“Katmandu,” “Navajo,” “Hopi,” “Sedona,” “Coyote,” “Grand Canyon,” “Monument Valley,” and “Painted Desert.”

The poems were created using Google (Blog) searches.  Each poem began with a search of a single word, the author “selecting [at first] the material with minimum discrimination,” using the material in the order in which it was found, and adding appropriate punctuation.  By the fourth poem, the author began reserving one result for the title and reducing all results to “lower case.”  In the fifth poem, he has eliminated all punctuation.  By the sixth poem, he has resumed adding or changing punctuation and has chosen to eliminate certain results from the poem altogether.  “The Google Sonnets” are clearly experimentational. 

The poems are conversational in tone and quite accessible.  In several poems, the poet makes use of the first person, giving the poems a human voice, in lines such as, “[I]’m writing to you from beautiful Sedona.”   The poet continues, describing Sedona as the “new member in our family.”  And in “Grand Canyon,” a woman “walk[s] across” the canyon toward a man who “[holds] her heart in his hands.”  “The Google Sonnets” are worth reading, no matter who Dig Chase is.