Writing Through Siddhartha by Andre Bagoo
Andre Bagoo’s Writing through Siddartha follows the lead of Writing through Finnegan’s Wake, John Cage’s sound-poem explorations of Joyce. In Writing through Siddartha Bagoo refashions Hermann Hesse’s eponymous novel, ripping out lines and phrases using an Oulipo style algorithm, replacing the novel’s core with ghost poems, whose parenthood is a heady mix of Bagoo, Hesse and mathematics. Writing through Siddartha is experimental poetry with a spiritual centre, proving that even if the heart of a text is removed, its soul remains.
Praise for Writing through Siddhartha:
'Writing through Siddhartha takes the text of Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel and scrambles it using a computer program. The result is a series of mantric litanies which at once take us to the heart of Hesse’s novel and beyond it to the moment of leaving behind, or enlightenment, sought by its eponymous hero, where the material world we cling to is revealed in its abstractness, its obverse sides and its cyclical rhythms.'
– Philip Terry, Oulipoems
'In Writing through Siddhartha, Andre Bagoo has found the beautifully meditative patterns that might make a good life; you’ll be entranced at how nirvana is to be discerned within these elegant incantations.'
– Rishi Dastidar, Saffron Jack
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