This playful e-poem generation machine places randomly selected words and assigns random relative value to them as it places them in the structure of a poker game. You play “Five Card Stud” against five randomly chosen poets, who play at differently randomized levels of “aggressiveness.”
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“Lexia to Perplexia” by Talan Memmott
Open “Lexia to Perplexia” by Talan Memmott
This celebrated work of e-literature is not only hard to label— poetry, fiction, theory, essay, English, code— it is also hard to read. This is not a criticism of the text: it is merely an observation on its ontological reality.
When Memmott wrote it in 2000, DHTML was a new thing, without established standards, and a key player in the browser wars. Aware of the difficulties in maintaining compatibility over time, he engaged its obsolescence thematically in the work. Nowadays, DHTML has come a long way towards becoming a new open standard, but the code in “Lexia to Perplexia” barely functions in modern browsers.
What can an interested reader do to experience more than the tip of the iceberg that is still functional in this text?
“White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares” by Loss Pequeño Glazier
Open: “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares” by Loss Pequeño Glazier
This long JavaScript poem by Glazier offers a sequence of stanzas that change every 10 seconds, disrupting the reading flow and thought process. This poem can be recombined for a total of 2.36 x 1021 (sextillion) distinct textual permutations of the poem, placing it in the tradition of Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes and Jim Andrews’ Stir Fry Texts.