One of the main problems in trying to convince a contemporary reader of the value and importance of Brion Gysin’s Permutation Poems can be summed up in one line:

This is a piece of code in the programming language ruby that recreates the entirety of the 1970s version of Gysin's most famous Permutation Poem: I AM THAT I AM. The fact that you can now take any contemporary laptop, download a ruby interpreter online for free, and use such little code to generate the entirety of this work can prevent the early 21st Century reader for seeing this poem for what it is: a revolutionary and technologically progressive piece of art built with cutting-edge technology. While today many of you would be able to run the code above and recreate Gysin's poem in milliseconds, you would be relying on pioneering research done into the implementation of permutation algorithms on computing machinary done in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The truth of the matter is that, although it looks simple, and is trivial to compute now, when Gysin and the Cambridge mathematician Ian Sommerville used computers to take his original hand-written poems and generate more extensive versions in the mid 1960s, they were utilizing cutting-edge technology and techniques that had not even existed a few years earlier. One of the aims of this website is to give a better understanding of how computer permutation algorithms were used in this period, in order to get a better understanding of the cutting-edge and pioneering technology that Gysin and his collaborator, Ian Sommerville were using to create this work. On the permutation algorithms page of the website, you can compare different historical algorithms from this period, see how they were implemented and how each one confers different aesthetics upon the poem when used.

One of the main aims of this website is to correct a series of errors that have crept into the Gysin scholarship regarding Gysin#s's Permutation Poems. One of the most important things to realize is that most of these poems have more than one version, often written years apart, and that each of these versions is often constructed in a different way and using different tehnology. The most extreme example of this is KICK THAT HABIT MAN which first appears in The Exterminator in 1960 where it is ordered in an ad hoc manner without computer assistance, then appearing in The Third Mind, where it was placed into reverse lexicographic order by Ian Sommerville, using a brand new Honeywell 200 Model 120 computer (released in 1965, the same year the book was finished (although it wasn't published until 1978)), and then in a pseudo-random order (probably ordered using a Linear Congruential Generator using a prime modulo of 19) in 1973's Brion Gysin Let The Mice In. Added to this, there is also another version, found in the collection Back In No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader, which incorrectly attributes it to The Exterminator, which has a different version, and The Last Museum, in which it does not appear - its actual origin remains unknown.

The BBC Programme

In 1960, Gysin was asked to create a radio programme for the BBC, in which he recorded some of his permutation poems. This was due to a BBC producer reading Minutes To Go, a book published by Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corsano in March 1960. According to John Geiger's brilliant biography, the recording was done in the summer of 1960, but was not broadcast until August the following year. From the BBC listings, it can be seen that the programme was broadcast from 22:00 to 22:15 on 15 August 1961 - a fact which indicates that the programme could no have been longer than 15 minutes, and not the 23 minutes stated in Geiger's book.

In much of the research about Gysin's work, several mistakes have been made regarding the use of computers in this BBC programme. There are several aural accounts from Gysin indicating that computers were used in generating the poems used for this recording. However, this computer would not have been the Honeywell 200 Model 120, as is commonly stated, as this model was not released until 1965. This confusion seems to stem from the fact that a computer was used to generate permutation poems for The Third Mind book, which explicitly states the above model as being used, and the presumption that, as many of the poems are found both in the BBC programme and the The Third Mind, that they are the same version. If Sommerville was to have run the poems through a computer for the BBC recording, this would most likely have been done on the EDSAC 2 computer at Cambridge University where he was a student at the time. However, I have some scepticism about whether computers were used at all for the poems featured on the BBC recording. This scepticism comes from a close reading of the poems themselves, comparing them to both existing permutation algorithms published at the time, as well as an analysis of the symbolic structures that govern their ordering, and how similar these are.

There are quite a few recordings of Gysin reading his permutation poetry from the 1960s, although it is, at present, difficult to assertain which of these are from the BBC recording. From the archival evidence, (most notably the tape C1400/5 held in the British Library) it seems that the programme featured the poems in the following order:
Side 1a (3:46): Pistol Poem / I've Come TO Free The Words / Pistol Poem (interlude) / No Poets Don't Own Words
Side 1b (5:01): Calling All Re active Agents / Pistol Poem (interlude) / Junk Is No Good Baby (Exterminator Version) / Pistol Poem (interlude) / Kick That Habit Man (Exterminator version) / Pistol Poem (interlude)
Side 1c (3:07): I AM THAT I AM
Total Time: 11:54

Out of these, the versions of JUNK IS NO GOOD BABY and KICK THAT HABIT MAN had appeared previously in The Exterminator, mostly written before Gysin had met Sommerville in Paris in the summer of 1959, and prior to Sommerville starting his studies at Corpus Christi Cambridge in the autumn of that same year. Of the rest, COME TO FREE THE WORDS appears to be written without computer assistance, given the frequent erroneous duplication of permutations (see the second and last stanza) and I AM THAT I AM seems to be a concatenation of two different versions of the poem, one an ad hoc version found elsewhere on the British Library's Gysin tapes which, after it finishes, switches to an earlier version of the poem (later published in An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, along with the mistakes found in that version).

This leaves only NO POETS DON'T OWN WORDS and PISTOL POEM as contenders for the use of computers, but as can be seen from through using the Comparison or Permutation Algorithm sections of the site, neither of these orders match any of the publically-known permutation algorithms available before 1960. It is important to remember that there were not many published permutation algorithms at this time, and it was only in 1962 that there was a sudden explosion of them in the pages of Communications of the ACM and The Computer Journal.

It seems more likely that although Sommerville might have introduced Gysin to the possibilities for using computation later in his studies (remember that he would only have been a first-year bachelor mathematics student by the summer of 1960), it is more likely that the use of computers for making the permutation poems only started occurring properly during the creation of The Third Mind in 1965. According to Geiger, Burroughs arrived in New York on 8 December 1964 to meet Gysin, who was already there and they worked on The Third Mind "dililgently, meeting most days at 9:30a.m. over a period of months, first in Burroughs’ room at the Chelsea Hotel, and later at a loft he moved into at 210 Center Street". However, the algorithm that is used in The Third Mind is a reverse lexicographic algorithm, first published by Ord-Smith in 1968, indicating that, either Sommerville independently created and implemented this algorithm three years before its discovery and publication, or that these algorithmic additions were a later addition, somewhere between the February 1968 publication of this algorithm and the publication of extracts of these poems in Brion Gysin Let The Mice In in 1973.

Permutation Algorithms

In terms of identifying the different algorithms used for generating the permutation poems, the reverse lexicographic ordering is the one which most commonly occurs. This is probably taken from Ord-Smith's BESTLEX algorithm (ACM algorithm 323), found in the February 1968 edition of Communications of the ACM. We can presume that all poems published in The Exterminator and Minutes To Go would have been written by hand, as these would probably have been finished at the very start of Gysin's relationship with Sommerville. Of the poems appearing in The Third Mind which had not been published previously, all apart from BREATHE IN THE WORDS and RUB OUT THE WORDS use reverse lexicographic ordering. This is a pretty technologically advanced solution, as even if the poems were fed into the algorithm in 1973, this would be using a technique only five years old, on a machine only three years older!

The An Anthology of Concrete Poetry version of I AM THAT I AM is dated 1958 which, coupled with the fact that Gysin often talked about I AM THAT I AM being the first of these types of poems that he wrote, may well be the earliest and original version.

Brion Gysin Let The Mice In features one poem from The Third Mind: JUNK IS NO GOOD BABY and cut-down versions of PISTOL POEM and I AM THAT I AM that only show some of the entire group of permutations featured in The Third Mind. KICK THAT HABIT MAN also appears but in a different ordering to The Third Mind.

The Brion Gysin Let The Mice In version of KICK THAT HABIT MAN is an outlier in Gysin and Sommerville's poems, in that it appears that a random number generator has been used to order the permutation. Given that this poem would have been written around 1973, it is likely that the types of generator used would be either a Linear Congruential Generator, invented in 1951 or Durstenfeld's 1964 implementation of the Fischer-Yates shuffle. One clue to how this might have been done is comparing this version of the poem with the reverse lexicographic version found in The Third Mind. What can be seen is that the last stanza of four lines is identical, as are the opening two lines. This suggests that the poem was first generated in reverse lexicographic order, then re-arranged. The fact that the identical lines at the top and bottom add up to 18 is a good indication that a Linear Congruential Generator might have been used to generate the order as, due to the fact that they work best when provided with a prime number modulus that allows them to generate a series of non-repeating pseudo-random numbers one less than the prime, it would make sense that the prime number 19 was used to generate a string of 18 numbers that were then used to re-order the poem.

The sporadic poems produced from the 1970s onwards tended to use a Magic Square style ordering. These included the poems THIS IS SAM FRANCIS, I DON'T WORK YOU DIG and the Orgy Boys version of NO POETS DON'T OWN WORDS. Perhaps this change back to an older style of arrangement, first used in the BBC radio version of NO POETS DON'T OWN WORDS might partly have been due to the loss of his collaborator, Ian Sommerville who was killed in a car accident at the age of 36 on 5 February 1976.

Acknowledgements

Much credit must go to those who have implemented Gysin's work before, especially:

Joseph Moore, who wrote the software "Permutations" for the exhibition Brion Gysin: Dream Machine on display at The New Museum for Contemporary Art between July 7th and October 3rd 2010. github

Nick Montford who also created an implementation in python and gave me feedback on some of the research that led to the development of this site, and whose blog post on authorship sparked off many of the questions this site attempts to answer.