Cat Typing

By: Aster Taylor

My favorite meme online right now is a video of someone doing any activity overlaid with “cats when the task requires zero cats” while the cat is impeding by chewing on yarn or tasting all the ingredients. My cat *loves* to type. He’s grown up around me writing and doing homework on my laptop and my grandma playing card games online, so he’s well acquainted with the QWERTY keyboard. I’ve given him his own word doc in my bookmarks bar so he can have a little computer time every now and then. It’s called the musings of a cat and so far, he’s made some very interesting creative works. But what do you do with that? I’m hoping to gather enough data to make some generative projects out of it. What is a generative project? Matthew Rohrer, my summer poetry professor, taught it as a poem that is focused on the creation rather than the meaning. A generative project would be one method of creating these poems that other people could replicate. He had us study some poets and replicate their methodologies. We did Jon Woodward’s “Rain” poems, 3 stanzas of 5 lines of 5 words per page; daily tankas like Harryette Mullen; and a few centos like Simone Muench’s “Wolf Centos.” By the end of the class, we all had to share one generational project so we’d have enough projects to last us a few months. My new proposed project is to create a golden shovel poem where the lines end with my cat’s typing. His typing method is very repetitive; he likes sitting on one key for a while before stepping around to get the right angle. Until then, I’m looking for other ways to teach my cat how to write. Maybe I’ll have him pick the order for a centos or write an imagist poem about him falling off the microwave this morning. Maybe I’ll squint and make a false translation out of what the characters look like.