I ♥ E-Poetry

When I read “Taroko Gorge,” by Nick Montfort, something about the endless scrolling through a natural landscape made me think of Gary Snyder’s masterpiece Mountains and Rivers without End, inspired largely by Chinese landscape scroll paintings.

As a longtime reader and admirer of Snyder’s poetry this mashup arises out of deep respect for both Snyder’s and Montfort’s work. This is not intended to imitate or generate lines by Snyder: merely to gestures towards his poetry. “Taroko Gary” is a path through a digital landscape, built out of Nick’s trailblazing poetry generation code and using some of Snyder’s words from “Endless Streams and Mountains” as cobbles.

So I have to thank Gary Snyder for his amazing poetry, Nick Montfort for “Taroko Gorge” and for inviting me to actualize the affinity I felt between his poem and Snyder’s work, and Mark Marino for starting this discussion thread in the Critical Code Studies Working Group 2012.

This piece is a minimalist language and poetry generator that assembles words and organizes them into lines of poetry of varying length from two bigram datasets, and assigns them a generated title, beginning with the word “the.” The image above is a sample of its results: mostly recognizable words, creating phrases that may or may not have semantic coherence, forming lines that could be metrically described as amphimacic monometer (/ _ /).

More importantly, by shaping the output of this program to fit poetic conventions and offering its result as poetry, it promotes reflection on the nature of poetry, its social function, and our own willingness to accept the results of a program as poetry.

• To what extent are we willing to play along with the word juxtapositions that seem to make no sense, if we know that they are the product of random processes and not a human mind that intended to communicate something?
• Then again, can the poems generated by “ppg256” be attributed to Nick Montfort, who obviously made carefully considered choices in programming this piece?
• What about readers who encounter one of these poems without knowing the context or its author(s), will they become unknowing participants in a Turing Test?

These are timely questions worth thinking about, as Mark Marino has in a detailed Critical Code reading “The ppg256 Perl Primer: The Poetry of Techneculture.”

The lines of this poem cascade down the screen, describing a peaceful natural scene. Its pacing is meditative, reminiscent of some Gary Snyder poems. Its rhythm is mostly iambic with abundant trochees at the beginning of lines and occasional spondees to punctuate moments in the poem. The pacing of the scrolling lines doesn’t let you stop and look away, but won’t be too demanding, and once a line scrolls past visibility it is gone: you cannot scroll up or down. Live the moment in this poem for as long as it lasts, until you reach the end or realize what’s going on… whichever comes first.

The JavaScript engine for this poem inspired a number of variations on this poem by prominent writers in the e-lit and digital humanities community, available here.

Upon completing my reading of the poetry in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 (tagged as ELC1 in this blog), some numbers and reflection on the works within is in order.

The ELC1 contains 60 works of e-literature, 38 of which are classifiable as poetry. Some of these works are certainly on the margins of what one might consider poetry, but I chose to include rather than exclude when in doubt. The authoring software distribution for these works is as follows:

The dominance of Flash as an authoring software and mode of publication is clear during the time this Collection was published (2006), perhaps for its smooth integration of multiple media, smooth animation, precise scheduling capability, and its ability to imbue a work with responsiveness. Mutability is not its strong suit, except when linked to user interaction. The poets who sought to create strongly combinatorial or generative works went with scripting languages such as Java, JavaScript, DHTML, and Processing, perhaps because they allowed more granular control over the programming codes.

The textual behaviors exhibited by the works in the collections are distributed as follows:

Of the 38 works, the most used behavior was scheduling (25), indicating an interest in exploring the possibilities of writing in a time-based medium. This was followed closely by responsiveness (24), which suggests that the other fascination lay in including the readers in the performance of the work in ways that the work could respond to. Static and kinetic texts were equally represented with 20 poems apiece, which might mean that they hold an equal interest for poets. The relatively low number of mutable poems (15) may be linked to the prevalence of Flash as authoring software, but not the 17 aural works, which is easy to handle with that program. Still almost half of the works (45%) incorporated some sort of sound, which points at some interest.

These numbers are from a relatively small sample, and one chosen by an editorial team that perhaps sought to represent a variety of practices in e-literature , so we cannot attribute too much importance. But they do point towards a trend in the development of e-literature, one that may change or become more defined over time.

This Collection was very well reviewed and received by the academic community, and with good reason, since the editorial board is composed of recognized poets and scholars in the field: Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland. For a thorough review, read “Letters that Matter” by John Zuern.

I started this blog with this collection because I knew it was full of quality work, and I’m grateful to the poets that crafted these experiences and to the editors who chose them and curated them so well. Now onward to the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2!