Combinatory Poetry

     I found the textbook chapter on combinatory poetics interesting because it evaluated different types of programming and technology to create poetry, and you wouldn't think there would be so many different ways to make poetry on a computer! I thought the difference between arranging and generating important to define. For example, Cent mille milliards de poèmes is an arranger because it takes already human-wrote words and enables them to be arranged into new lines. The textbook calls this "mutating existing texts" which is a large theme in E-Lit itself as a phenomenon is mutating existing rules and formats to create electronic works. Whereas for E-Lit combinatory poetics which generate new poems, the textbooks states that "the author of a poetry generator is striving for multiplicity" and thus the best outputs from the generator will be "compelling literary experiences" that are compelling because they illustrate the "most interesting range of possibilities the literary system can produce". All of this meaning that a poetry algorithm on a computer can be interesting to read the generated poems because it itself as a generator is fascinating on a programable sense, and (in my opinion) it creates something to think about in the mutation of traditional poetry with electronic means. Can you really call these generators poetry? Are they only sketches, or are they finished works? The textbook notes that the poetry generator algorithms are not always good writing but they can be good works of electronic literature because of how they enable programming and the technological platform to create something thoughtful. Still, "compelling poetry often relies on strange juxtapositions and ambiguities" the textbook says, so one can argue that these combinatory poems are just a new way of forming strange meaning in our new technological world. When we use programs and electronic platforms as an extension of human thought in their algorithms, are we creating something fruitful? We are at least creating poetry that is surprising, an artistic display of the technological mediums we have available now. 

    Cent mille milliards de poèmes is not always going to create a poem that makes sense. In fact, that's likely not the point of the program at all in it's "peeling back" of the ten layers of sonnets. Raymond Queneau's book has 10 sonnets with 14 lines each, making 10x14th combinations. That's a lot of multiplicity. The combinations work well because the sonnets are all written in similar style and rhyme. The textbook says this commentary poetry can be understood as "procedural writing games or algorithms" and it does indeed feel like a game working with the poetry on the website making my own sonnet. In the Oulipian sense, these "writers described the constraints as liberating: by focusing on the constraints, they can allow the writing they produce to surprise them". I was surprised with some of the themes and poetic stories I could create in the sonnets through their layering. I found that different voices appeared to me, and I liked that I could save the beginning of a sonnet and patch together a different ending. l love that it combines traditional strict sonnet rules of petameter and rhyming with a way to interact with these strict rules in a new context. I think again what we read last week that e-lit cannot exist without the prior rules of literature and poetry. Looking further into e-lit projects, I can see now the mutations appearing that have created this genre on top of the prior traditional guidelines. I can also see how multiplicity is in an important theme in these modern mutations because we have the language, we have the baselines, but now we have to find new ways to combine them and present them. I think Cent mille milliards de poèmes is a great example of how this can be done.