Combinatory Poetics

 “A Sinister Soliloquy” 

Note: My strategy when working with Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes was to try to pick lines that had something in common. I guess you could say I was trying to make sense of the chaos, but I didn’t expect the poem to get as dark as it did (even though I do still like it). After reading it a few times, I thought that it could be about a vampire who blamed society for his poverty and took revenge by burning the city to the ground. Centuries later, he recounts his story to his latest victim, a wealthy and arrogant aristocrat. It was definitely interesting to invert the common idea of the vampire as high-class. 

House of Trust by Stephanie Strickland and Ian Hatcher: https://www.house-of-trust.org/ 

Combinatory poetics is one of the first genres of electronic literature, and it has its roots in a variety of literary and art movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Oulipo – which play with concepts related to spontaneity, the subconscious, and writing under constraint. Each of these aspects can be found in combinatory poetics, which often uses constrictive rules or code to produce seemingly random poetry often analyzed or interpreted by readers to have a meaning unique to the individual. The digital format always plays a key role; this type of poetry typically has a generative aspect that can only be achieved online through code. It is also important to the history of electronic literature in general, since it helped to establish the collaborative culture of digital literature and raised questions about the authorship of pieces to which reader and programmer contribute just as much as the writer. 

While writing about the history of combinatory poetics, Scott Rettberg refers to Alison Knowles’ and James Tenney’s House of Dust as one of the first computer poems, whose wide circulation and multimedia repetitions inspired many writers of electronic literature (36-37). Among these was House of Trust by Stephanie Strickland and Ian Hatcher, described by Rettberg as “a generative paean to libraries” (37). When I first opened the link to the website, I was initially surprised by the lack of interactivity. This was a misunderstanding on my part, but I had thought that there would be some kind of user input which would affect the content of the poem. Nonetheless, I really liked the simplicity of the platform; its minimalist design emphasizes the poetry itself, as well as the images generated alongside it. I found myself wondering about why the pictures were included, and if they were meant to add an extra touch of randomness to each piece. And yet, despite the spontaneous nature of the writing, after a while of generating poems, I started to notice that they would sometimes make more sense than I expected. This reinforced Rettberg’s theory earlier in the chapter, that people often search for meaning where there isn’t necessarily any.