Chapter 2: Combinatory Poetics

The second chapter of Electronic Literature focuses on combinatory poetics, like dada, surrealism, and Oulipo. I found dada the most interesting because it is like a collage of words. It consists of taking a bunch of words and scrambling them to create something new and creative, like we did at the museum with note cards. Dada is described as ironic, chaotic, and it is referred to as "anti-art," which I think is fitting for digital literature. Much like digital literature, it is rebellious and challenges traditions and cultural norms. Combinatory poetics need the digital media because of how they can randomly generate words and phrases taken from other works. Using technology, authors are able to have an unlimited amount of words at their fingertips. Computer algorithms can be used to create art, which can make thousands of different results much faster than if a person were to do it by hand.

Rettberg references a poem generator that I thought was similar to Strachey's Love Letters called Auto-Beatnik. The program generates random poems that sound very artsy and philosophical. There are so many layers of irony to unpack, like the fact that beatniks were obsessed with self-expression and rejecting society's views. It is ironic, because a machine can easily generate a poem that sounds like a beatnik wrote them. The poems are meant to be unique and stand out, and yet a computer can predict what a beatnik would write. I could not find the link to the actual generator, and there were not many results about it, but I found an example of what the program would generate that was not in our textbook:

Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won’t keep few fishes,
Who is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious, blind planes are coming,
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender.

While the poems are kind of nonsense, they are convincing enough to make a reader believe that someone actually wrote them by using a lot of imagery and popular words. For example, floral imagery is found often in poetry, and using the word "blind" to describe an inanimate object like a house or plane makes the reader think the "author" is being "deep" and thoughtful, when it was really written by a computer program.

https://elmcip.net/creative-work/auto-beatnik

Meg Champagne