Reading Revelation with Kafka (1)

i am too busy to concentrate on writing poetry, so i am generating machines/systems to write poetry for me. my latest project is to use the deterministic model of the seed/source text. my source text is the Revelation of John (from the New American Bible) to which i always find myself returning, and my seed text is my favourite writer, Kafka (that is, the letters in his name).

the concept is to crawl through the book of Revelation, pulling out (in order) the letters that begin with the letters in Kafka's name. i am going in order, one letter at a time, and cycling. i am also following chapter divisions and only citing the text body (no headings or notes). what i am going to end up with is a set of 22 acrostic "chapters." so far i've done the first chapter. here you go. we'll see where this takes me and if it ends up being worthwhile. my hope in picking a short word is that i get a lot of repititions which might allow a pattern/structure to emerge. i was tempted to use wolves, as i am still plugging away on writing a thousand or so pages of poems, all called wolves, but i wanted to bring a more charged word to bear on the Bible, and using the name Kafka sets up all manner of interesting tensions with religion and authority.


1

known
angel
for
kings
and

kingdom
and
Father
kingdom
and

keys
and