What an impressive little poetry generating machine Rui Torres has put together! The poem itself isn’t that complex, consisting of 10 variables that randomly display words from carefully chosen word datasets. Part of what makes it impressive is how Torres has crafted two interfaces to interact with the poem and one to publish the results— all of which highlight the immensity of potential texts in different ways. The horizontal interface takes a visual approach by creating a textual landscape with infinite vanishing points in all directions. The vertical, almost more viscerally, displays a number of possible poems so huge (as of this reading “999999579351521 poemas possíveis [possible poems]” that it reminds us of the permutational possibilities of this and other poems in the tradition of Raymond Queneau’s “Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes.” The background voice and sounds soothingly set a poetic tone while reinforcing a sense of space. A neat feature is that readers can assemble poems with the interface and materials provided and publish them in a blog, so they can leave behind records of their reading.
Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.
