"Consider doing this same experiment, but, instead of poetry, it's literally anything STEM, and, when our criminally underpaid participants preferred ChatGPT, we gleefully write a paper titled 'AI-generated physics is indistinguishable from human-written physics.' It's unimaginable that such a paper would pass peer-review in any scientific journal."
"The notion that the language of one (Cummings) is considered legitimate due to its production by an autonomous will or intention into language and its subversions, and the other (Wernicke’s patient) not so because it is an effect of illness and therefore an unintended accident, reproduces a system of value contingent on the Western subject of colonialism-capitalism. The division of poetic versus aphasic (read: not-poetic) speech is layered with the racism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism of a colonial order that also continues to delegitimate other syntactical and linguistic deviations found in linguistic practices."
"If texts become liquid, they become flexible, permeable, and difficult to contain. If we can make them slosh around in a big bucket, maybe we can catch some drops on our tongue..."
Nick Montfort's poetics: "Writing very small-scale computational poems allows me to learn more about computing and its intersection with language and poetry. Not computing in the abstract, but computing as embodied in particular platforms, which are intentionally designed and have platform imaginaries and communities of use and practice surrounding them."
"If gender weren’t mostly for other people’s benefit, we wouldn’t put so much effort into it (I sweep my floors before friends come over, not once they’ve gone back home)." (by charles theonia)
"Working with or against writing systems and what other poets and artists have done with them, we learn something vital about language as it relates to identity that isn’t taught in critical ethnic studies classes or by community elders or culture workers. Or in an MFA poetry workshop, for that matter. And what poets know about language and identity that people whose institutional job or mission it is to know about language and identity do not know is in the poet’s work, in the poems. "
Daniel Temkin on Code Poetry
intuitive and fun blackout poetry interface, using snippets from project gutenberg
"a linked collection of poems that respond to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station... translat[ing] this elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other transcontinental railroad workers’ histories" grand, ambitious work of elit/epoetry
"Snelson plays a wandering bard – misusing the system to produce the most unlikely of scrawls: small poems scattered across the game’s landscape. The book is a documentation of that performance in a prosody marked by the poetics of fandom. They are recorded here as movie captures, static images, and poetic texts, arranged in four parts spelling a newly coherent object."
incredibly insightful review. "Their exact words, not just their paraphraseable meaning but their precise choices of phrasing, become full of comprehensible information about character, and this gives the characters themselves an unusual reality and presence. As in all good poetry, it is the language itself, and not just the plot and worldbuilding, that makes us care."
"Today is a good day to look at a photo of early Samuel R. Delany"
okay I had no idea this existed: an interactive CD-ROM of various Oulipo texts
"Icons are not primitive or rudimentary attempts to duplicate the physical world; they are nuanced and complex attempts to embody the spiritual world."
"Alt-text is an essential part of web accessibility. It is often overlooked or understood through the lens of compliance, as an unwelcome burden to be met with minimum effort. How can we instead approach alt-text thoughtfully and creatively?" (presented at wordhack dec 2020)
generates (via markov chain) and speaks made-up words from various corpora
"freely available for research with the condition that the research be used for the benefit of children"
sam and tega. very good
'...very boring stories that did not even satisfy my youngest children... I tried these stories on my very small children but after some minutes they grew very irritable, because nothing actually happened. This shows that even small children of three can measure entropy'
"Conclusion: We hypothesized that radical swings in affective posture would make the writer more emotionally flexible. Likewise, we hypothesized that attempting to discern the emotional valences of a machine learning model derived from achingly sensitive Tumblr posts would make the writer more empathetic. Unfortunately, no conclusions could be drawn from a single poem."
ranjit!
"On October 19th of 1955, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Marianne Moore, was approached by a Mr. Robert Young of the Ford Motor Company and asked to assist them in naming a new series of cars."
uses my poetry corpus! though points out some shortcomings.
"In this interactive installation participants enter the first word that comes to their mind in one of two input terminals in any language. These words are then the seed of a generative process that develops a poem, bifurcating and mutating, merging languages, poetic styles, sense and nonsense. Poems overlap and degrade over time, eventually fading away. Phonetics are remapped to a new alphabet of sound referencing the body and incidental noises, creating a unique expression for each word and making literal the arbitrariness of the language. This installation was projected on a massive scale covering the walls and ceiling and filling the hall of the old imperial castle in Poznan, Poland. This video shows a demonstration of the generated poetry."
kyle mcdonald's take