Appendix—Note about the Sources, Licence, and Software

Sources

When I created this chapbook in 2022, the majority of the sources that I selected to write cover poems of had already entered Canada’s public domain. Some selections would not have been considered public domain. I have reproduced those works for the sake of enabling review and critique of the cover poem method that I used. Each cover poem is presented alongside a comparison of its own sonic topology visualization and its source’s sonic topology visualization, which I generated using Poemage. To use these visualizations toward any sort of insight or analysis of the poems, and to get a sense of how the poem was written, a reader needs some familiarity with the source text. Thus, I believe that presenting these works in this context is a legitimate use of fair dealing.

Selections in the public domain include: E. E. Cummings, E. Pauline Johnson, Mina Loy, Émile Nelligan (except the English version that I translated), Carl Sandberg, Wallace Stevens, Leo Tolstoy, and William Carlos Williams. The poems of André Breton, Kenji Miyazawa, and Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī would be public domain but their translations would likely not be. The pieces authored by Margaret Avison, Louis Dudek, Milorad Pavić, and F. R. Scott would not have been considered public domain and thus remain under the copyright of their authors or translators.

Licence

I’ve licensed each of the fifteen new poems that I wrote (those composing April Sigma but excluding its appendix of source works) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence. These new poems may support further derivative works. I believe that this licensing technique will encourage experimentation with the idea of a cover poem.

Poemage Software

All the sonic topology visualizations were generated using the Poemage tool. More information about Poemage, including its source code and executables for Linux, Macintosh, and Windows is available at https://www.sci.utah.edu/~nmccurdy/Poemage/.