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), a historical, ethnographic narrative written by Charles E. Brown for the performance of a young Native American Indian woman at the unveiling ceremonies of bronze markers on the Indigenous Ho-Chunk effigy mounds on Observatory Hill at the University of Wisconsin—Madison located in the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives (1914), and a letter from Brown to State Architect Mr. Roger C. Kirchoff about the threatened destruction of two linear mounds on the public, land-grant university campus located in the same archives (1938). The linear mounds were destroyed to build an additional men's dormitory on campus.
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 bairn of her own body be given unto the fire.
Eastward and some westward. Only the turtle family remained.
Linear MOUNDS located in the old Picnic Grove are.
Of either folk, whom war had ta'en. Gone was their flower.
After traveling for many days they reached the borders.
The erection of North Hall, Bascom Hall, Agricultural Hall.
Should, with his ring-giving, favor Hengest's men.
Under these happy conditions the families of red children.
Many University alumni and others who are interested in.
There wound unto the welkin a huge bale's blaze.
Fish in the streams and fruits and roots on the hills.
Additional mens dormitories. I know that the destruction of.
Upon that pyre was plain to sight the gore-bespattered sark.
In time they were joined here by another W**nebago family.
MOUNDS. Their presence will add to the interest of these.
