Participants will learn a brief history of combinatorics, randomness, and automation in relation to poetry. Examples used range from works by Raymond Queneau of the OuLiPo to Alison Knowles of the Fluxus movement to modern-day Twitter bots. Then using Nick Montfort’s adaptation of A House of Dust, we will create computational poetry that will live on the web. The workshop will use HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but all are welcome — no coding experience necessary. This workshop is co-led with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Assistant Professor at UMass-Boston. Final output can be see at poetry.designforthe.net
You'll see two versions of A House of Dust. The first requires the user to click a button to generate a poem, and the second automates this process. You can see how the page will appear by dragging the html file into your browser window.
Pick one of these versions. Delete the other version.
Save the file as 'firstname.html', e.g. 'mindy.html'.
Open your html file in Sublime to see the source code. Mindy will go over the syntax, and show you where to input your own text.
Don't forget to change your metatitle!
Begin finding content and replace the lists in the Javascript.
When you collect content, make sure you save the metadata—links, names, dates, etc. Please include this in the source code in the commented section. Also include your name, workshop date, title, etc. in source code.
While the generator will quickly produce text en masse, you are the author of this poem.
How does your source material change the context of your poem?
Are you using lyrics of songs, titles of news articles, verses of poems, concrete poetry, etc?
Test the generator
Modify your lists until you are satisfied with the combinations produced.
Focus on the rhetoric, not the deployment.
Does your generator create surprising combinations? How does the randomization affect your original source material?
Does your poem have a critical edge?
How does the language suggest time period? What are the historical connotations?
What language frames your experiences today?
Consider how your words connect. Do you have fixed phrases paired with those that randomize? Does everything randomize? Do your words touch? Where are the line breaks? Do you need indentation? Etc.
CSS Coding Tutorial *optional
Mindy will highlight some key properties that you may use to style your poems.
Some final poems below... To see all poems by participants, please visit the poetry index.
Yael's 2018 → View poem To comment on the recent Florida massacre, this poem scrapes article titles about gun controversy and dates of school shootings from the past decade. This is juxtaposed from titles for benign and mundane events that tend to receive more attention than important happenings.
Sarah's Dedication → View poem This poem was generated by importing variables into conventions for dedications in novels and texts. Lists include the top 200 person names, the top 100 place names, and the top 100 titles from Women Writers Online.
Steven's A Formula for Success → View poem Using tropes from cooking blogs, common words are counted and displayed in different opacities to represent frequency of use.
