Blog Post 2

Chapter 2 within Electronic Literature discusses the concept of combinatory poetics and how it is considered the oldest form of electronic literature. Rettburg discusses three main combinatory poetics: Dada, Surrealism, and Oulipo. Dada is defined as "a multimedia avant-garde art movement" (Rettburg 20) which started during World War I. The style of Dada relies on the rejection of culture artifacts and the "elevation of the importance of audience response to and interaction..." (21). Rettburg also notes how Dada promoted the destruction of art and culture before its creation. When discussing the concept of surrealism, Rettburg defines surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally... (23). Unlike Dada, Surrealism focuses on expanding social writing and the influence surrealism has had on computational combinatory writing. Rettburg highlights how surrealism has increased the use of multimedia elements into digital media and was able to combine both image and text. Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Oulipo) is a style of combinatory writing that originated from France. Rettburg describes how Oulipo poetics were made up of writers and mathematicians. The Oulipo used "procedures to generate writing that they would not have imagined in the absence of those procedures" (28). One of the most influential works created by the Oulipo was the "Workshop for Potential Literature" which combined combinatory and generative poetics.

  The reference I want to focus on is a poetry generator titled Taroko Gorge. I felt this reference is relevant to our current lesson because we just created a random collaborative word poem in class. Created by Nick Montfort, the name Taroko Gorge is a reference to a Taiwan national park. Montfort used HTML/CSS/JavaScript to create the poetry generator. One of the example poems Rettburg gives is
Mists exercise the basin.
Mists dream.
Stones pace the veins.
     run the arched cool-
Shapes pace the vein.
Coves relax.
The crag roams the basins
     shade the encompassing. (47)

Here is the poem that was generated when I visited the website,
Brows pace the rock.
Layer ranges the stones.
  track the rough objective —
The crags sweep the shapes.
Stones hold.
Rocks relax.
The crag ranges the basin.
  direct the clear dim driven —

I thought it was interesting that both poems focused on different types of nature, but still reference the word "basin".
https://nickm.com/taroko_gorge/

Tim.W