generative – Page 9 – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“Spam Heart” by David Jhave Johnston

May 8, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This generative poem is built from “spam, code, thesis work, and a little bit of language’s heart.” Each part of the poem is organized into three strophes: the first one uses a larger font, the second one consists of a single word, and the third uses three words. Upon opening the poem, the first strophe is selected randomly from a dataset, after which it begins a sequence that reads coherently from one textual generation to the next. The second and third strophes are always independently randomly selected from their datasets, creating new textual combinations with the constant sequence in the first strophe.

“Taroko Gary” by Leonardo Flores

February 28, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Taroko Gary” by Nick Montfort

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.

“Taroko Gorge” by Nick Montfort

February 17, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

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.

“Generative Poetry” by geniwate

September 18, 2018January 3, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Generative Poetry” by geniwate

These three works all use geniwate’s “concatenation engine,” a page architecture designed in Director and inspired by William Burrough’s cut-up. The first one, “Concatenation,” creates a responsive space of exploded letters which generate phrases when clicked upon by the reader following algorithms that randomize word selection and arrangement on the screen. “When You Reach Kyoto,” places the engine in collaboration with Brian Kim Stefans’ photography and text and was published as part of the Machine Poetics “page_space project.”