Taroko Gorge Remixes – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“TransmoGrify” by Leonardo Flores

December 30, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Transmogrify: to change or alter greatly and often with grotesque or humorous effect (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).

This poem is a celebration of Nick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge” and the more than 20 remixes made from its source code, leading to what I consider the beginning of a new born-digital poetic form.

What Montfort has created with this poem generator is a way to find patterns in endless permutation of limited elements. But the poem is not in the endlessly looping textual output it produces, which is merely a temporary, ever-changing expression of an idea. The poem is in the moment a human intelligence reads that output, for however long necessary, and realizes what the poet wanted to express with those output patterns. The poem is in the pattern, teased out through the manipulation of variables and endless tweaks to the code to get this darned engine to produce something that roughly gestures towards what the poets wish to express.

“Taroko Gorge [2012 remix]” by Nick Montfort

December 29, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Screen shot from “ Taroko Gorge” by Nick Montfort. Green background with part of a poem in white letters. Text: “The crag commands the ripplings./ Shape trails the rock./ track the tough objective clear dim -/ Brow commands the cove./ The crags hum./ Mists exercise the veins./ translate the rough objective clear dim - / Layers command the basins./ Shapes rest./ Mists trail the rock./ track the sinuous –“ In the right corner of the picture there are words that read “Taroko Gorge/ Nick Montfort/ Scolt Rellberg/ J.R. Carpenter/ J.R. Carpenter/ J.R. Carpenter/ Talan Memmolt/ Eric Snodgrass/ Mark Sample. Maria Engberg/ Flourish Klink/ Andrew Plotkin/ Brendan Howell/ Adam Sylvain/ Leonardo Flores/ Alireza Mahzoon/ Sonny Rae Tempest/ Kathi Inman Berenes/ Helen Burgess/ Judy Malloy/ Bob Bonsall/ Check Rybak/ Nick Montfort 2012-12-09” The title of the work in light green and the names in blue. Every name is crossed over with a line except the last one, which is the Author’s. — Open “Taroko Gorge [2012 remix]” by Nick Montfort

Spoiler alert: Are you experienced?

If you have never read “Taroko Gorge,” read this first. (You’re in for a treat!)
If you haven’t read any of its remixes, read some entries (and poems).
If you’re experienced in this set of poems, read on.

On January 8, 2009, Nick Montfort published “Taroko Gorge” a generative e-poem written and programmed in Python and ported to JavaScript for Web publication. When opened, the code generates a nature poem about the famous Taroko Gorge national park in Taiwan. Part of its interest is that it produces endless permutations of its elements— stones, coves, forests, crags, basins, flows, mists, and the occasional monkey sightings— recreating part of the experience of hiking down this river canyon. Its scheduled, endlessly generated nature parallels the endless flux and change of nature over time. Just as you can never step into the same river twice, you cannot reread the same text of the poem. But rivers and the canyons they carve can be named, can produce consistent experiences for those who explore them in the same way that the output of the “Taroko Gorge” script produces a consistent poetic experience. With this poem, Montfort recreates an endless pattern of change found in nature.

“Tacoma Grunge” by Chuck Rybak

December 28, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This generative poem is published as a blog posting and framed by the story of a young Scott Rettberg in graduate school, learning HTML and writing electronic literature at a time before his department had a website. Twenty years later, Rybak’s first attempt at writing e-literature is built upon Rettberg’s “Tokyo Garage” by changing the data set to evoke a cultural scene from the early 1990s.

This here is a re-remix (in a long line of remixes) of the generated nature poem Tokoro Gorge by Nick Montfort, as well as the urban, modern, and playful Tokyo Garage by Scott Rettberg. Nick Montfort wrote the code, which was remixed at the word level by Scott Rettberg, and I hacked Rettberg’s words to make the poem about something else, basically so I could learn something about electronic literature while experiencing it. Remixed May 15, 2012 by Chuck Rybak.

Read more

“The Dark Side of the Wall” by Bob Bonsall

December 27, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This generative poem creates a mashup of lyrics from two famous Pink Floyd albums: The Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon. The poem is organized into tercets followed by a single line in which Waters or Gilmour “takes over,” signaling shifts in leading roles in the band, which has a history of turbulent power struggles. Each tercet is assembled from lines from each album, lending both coherence at the line level, and intriguing juxtapositions that reveal some of Pink Floyd’s poetics.

“Scholars Contemplate the Irish Beer” by Judy Malloy

December 26, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This generative poem transports its readers to Ireland, and all the water, sunshine, green fields, agriculture, and magic that goes into brewing its world-famous beers. This work is populated by poets, scholars, musicians, the pooka— a mischievous, dark, shape-shifting fairy creature— fields, blue lakes, valleys, forests, and other shapes taken by the land. All the people, faerie, and personified landscapes consider, contemplate, and dream of how they all are a part of the real and mystical brew that flows from St. James Gate.

“Tasty Gougère” by Helen Burgess

December 25, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Tasty Gougère” by Helen Burgess

This generative poem is dedicated to the gourmand in all of us. Though perhaps it’s more interested in exorcising it through health awareness. The poem itself is a remix of “Taroko Gorge” based on eating deliciously fatty and unhealthy foods, such as the Gougère from the title, but Burgess adds two other factors: one is an LDL cholesterol counter that counts up to 160 and provides advice on seeking medical attention, and another is a marquee strip that scrolls information on high levels of triglycerides and cholesterol levels. The masterstroke in this variation is the use of the “path” function in the code, which instead of revealing a monkey or Captain Kirk, it produces the phrase “myocardial infarction.”

It would be particularly visceral if this variation would stop after executing this function, but modern medicine has allowed many people to survive a heart attack. And so the gorging on deliciously fatty foods continues, for as long as a body can bear it.

“Tournedo Gorge” by Kathi Inman Berens

December 24, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This generative poem folds in two distinctly different activities— cooking and coding— to create a mélange that harmoniously foregrounds their similarities. For example, declaring variables and establishing a data set in a program is conceptually equivalent to listing ingredients and measurements in a recipe. Both recipes and code are executed sequentially: one by a cook, and another by the computer to produce output. From this perspective, the food produced from a recipe is much like the poem generated by the execution of its source code.

“Camel Tail” by Sonny Rae Tempest

December 23, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This generative work produces a 4 line stanza out of lines from Metallica albums every 5.5 seconds. It uses a single variable (“hair”) and a data set consisting of choice Metallica lines to produce what seems like endless Metallica lyrics. On the right hand column Tempest explains the impetus for the poem:

Many of these lines have played at random on my brain-station since I was a child, so to some degree they’re part of my story as well. Camel Tail is my attempt to find an overall narrative within Metallica’s work, or at the very least, to help uncover why I’m so mad all the time

Read more

“Snowball” by Alireza Mahzoon

December 22, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Snowball” by Alireza Mahzoon

This generative poem about snow, slipping, and falling is aggressively scheduled to produce a sensation of motion and slippage. One cannot keep up for very long as a reader of this poem, but this is not a big problem because reading a sampling of any of its verses will give you an idea of what the poem is about. Like narrative comic strips and soap operas, there is plenty of redundance built into its structure, so you can join in, leave it, and rejoin at any time.

This is true of all the other “Taroko Gorge” remixes, but it is a realization that doesn’t come to readers as quickly or clearly because they are all generating at a rate that is comfortable to readers: “Taroko Gorge” generates a line of poetry every 1200 milliseconds (1.2 seconds), and I would guess the other remixes didn’t modify this parameter. Mahzoon’s poem generates a line every 400 milliseconds, and its hectic result is clear. It is also the one with the fewest words in its data set, so it takes the least time to understand its point.

You’ll find your legs on this slippery slope of a poem.

“Inside the House” by Adam Sylvain

December 21, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Based on Mark Z. Danielewsky’s House of Leaves, this generative poem imagines an endless hallway inside of a house, the novel’s macguffin. In the novel, as Navidson discovers that a hallway inside his new house is larger than the external dimensions of the house itself, and it is growing, he organizes an expedition into its depths, spending days exploring it without adequately mapping it. This “Taroko Gorge” remix was written by a student of Mark Sample’s “Post Print Fiction” course, and the mashup of the two works is an appropriate exploration of infinity, bound by human limits. As you enter the labyrinth that is this poem, think about how personified this hallway seems to be and what it means to explore the depths of its twisty little passages.