Cow poetry

I hadn't heard of this, but it was posted on one of the listservs I'm on. Apparently, a few years ago, a performance art piece was constructed to have cows create poetry.

Banks, a 22-year-old student at Purchase College, painted single words (from "a" to "existential") on the flanks of about 60 cows near his upstate New York home, then let them wander around to see if they could compose poetry. So Holsteins and Jerseys named Elsie and Maggie came up with phrases like "eccentric art," "performance as cow environment" and Banks' own favorite, "organic conceptual art as poetry." One animal seemed especially inspired -- with "away" written on her side, she broke loose from the herd for a while.

There's something about this that struck me as very amusing.