Jackson Mac Low, from the preface to Bloomsday (1984)

The poem "Antic Quatrains" appears in Bloomsday in a section entitled "Three Works from 1980-81".

..."Antic Quatrains" [...] is a by-product of an elaborate project entitled "A Vocabulary for Annie Brigitte Gilles Tardos." This was a room-sized poetry environment I produced for the exhibition "Sound at P.S. 1" (September through November 1979 at Project Studios One, Long Island City, N.Y.). It included two wall-sized oil-stick drawings on paper (14' x 6' and 9' x 6') and many copies of five large designs printed on transparent colored acetate and mounted over the panes of the windows of the room. Both the drawings and the printed designs on acetate were composed solely of sentences derived from a 5,000-word source list (also exhibited) of words spelled solely with the letters of the dedicatee's name, with no letter repeated in any form of a word that was used in the sentences more times than in the complete name. The word list was computerized, and random series of two to ten words or single words (each word accompanied by all permissible suffixes) were printed out. This 3,000-line computer printout of word series and single words was also exhibited and was itself the source of "Antic Quatrains."

When composing the poem, in March 1980, 1 used successive series of five or fewer words beginning with a randomly determined point in the printout. Longer word series were skipped. The words from the printout were connected into sentences by structure words (articles, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, etc.) also spelled solely with the letters of Ms. Tardos's name (thus "of "is always represented by "o'") to form loosely iambic pentameter lines arranged in unrhymed (or occasionally rhymed) quatrains.