The following experimental digital documentary poem is composed of citations of William Ellery Leonard's new verse translation of the Old English poem Beowulf (1923), George Gales's Upper Mississippi: or, Historical Sketches of the Mound-Builders, The Indian Tribes, and the Progress of Civilization in the North-West (1867), and "The Spirit Raccoon," a Ho-Chunk narrative of Lake Mendota by a storyteller once known, collected by Charles E. Brown and the Folklore Section of the Federal Workers' Project in Wisconsin in Wisconsin Indian Place Legends (1936).
When this MOUND web page is loaded and/or reloaded, server-side code selects and loads a random collection of lines from a relational database of citations:
The sky the reek has swallowed. The Weders raised thereby.
Was, among many others, taught by Pythagoras and Plato.
At present known as Maple Bluff. Here the raccoon had.
Calling him a World-King, the mildest under crown.
Entirely without evidence: first that the MOUND-Builders used.
On the lake bank but was unable to help him. For many.
Calling him a World-King, the mildest under crown.
The fact that many modern Indians have names that can not.
Of the "spirit" raccoon awoke. He was very thirsty and.
Seen afar from ocean by sailors on their ways.
Infer, that these animal effigies were connected with the.
Bluff. Kneeling at its rim, he began to drink its water. The more.
His wonder-works of glory. Let it ever be.
The animal that the priest or relatives had directed the departed.
Ceased. It returned again the moment he ventured into shallower.
