Perl – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“Fields of Dream” by Nick Montfort and Rachel Stevens

September 25, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This literary game which can be equally used to create prose and verse is a tribute to the Surrealist parlor game known as the “exquisite cadaver” and the paper-based Mad Libs created by Roger Price and Leonard Stern in 1953 (for more details, read Montfort’s introduction to the Literary Games issue of Poems that GO). This program originally created in Perl allows people to create texts and tag words to become “dreamfields.” When someone blindly fills in the dreamfield, it reconstructs the text with the reader’s input. Hilarity ensues.

“Orbital” by Max Dunlop and Neil Jenkins

April 24, 2019September 15, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Orbital” by Max Dunlop and Neil Jenkins

This poem is the result of two creative collaborations: Max Dunlop’s poem “orbital: a postcard to space travel” and Neil Jenkins’ generative engine that creates an entirely different experience of the work.

“Sestinas” by Dan Waber

June 21, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This generative poem produces more sestinas than the known universe. To be precise, it can produce 910,251,623,407,960,787,539,543,324,904,089,233, 758,905,973,536,329,779,381,000,049,443,843,029,464,779,513,168,359,606, 194,209,951,426,108,247,244,800,000,000,000,000,000 possible variations (as calculated by Waber). It’s a heck of a lot more than Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (100,000,000,000,000 poems), which would require more time to read than is possible in a lifetime. After a certain point, one would have to wonder what is the point of reading a poem that is impossible to read fully?

Perhaps that is not the point.

“ppg256” by Nick Montfort

February 23, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

montfort__ppg256 — Open “ppg256” by Nick Montfort

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.”

Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.