This tentative/draft syllabus updated January 24, 2026.
Instructor: Nick Montfort, in@mkcinckm.com
Class meets in 14E-310, Tuesdays 7pm–10pm
Office hours / open studio by Zoom (URL provided in class) 9am–10am Thursdays
With some exceptions: Not on 2/12, 3/26, 4/30.
On 4/2 office hours / open studio will likely be both in person (14E-316) and on Zoom.
Students study and use innovative compositional techniques, focusing on new writing methods. Using approaches ranging from poetics to computer science, students undertake critical and creative writing, with writing experiments culminating in print or digital projects. Students read, listen to, and create different types of work, including sound poetry, cut-ups, constrained and Oulipian writing, uncreative writing, false translations, artists' books, and digital projects ranging from video games to computer-generated books. Digital art and literature, analyzed and discussed in the contexts of history, culture, and computing platforms, are covered, as well as avant-garde writing methods, situated in their historical contexts. Topics vary by year; may be repeated for credit with permission of the instructor. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.
This Spring 2025 offering has an experimental emphasis and will allow students to engage with 20th and 21st Century avant gardes by using their writing techniques with attention to what they meant historically and could mean now. Computational writing as understood in our context is a species of experimental writing. Part of our work will involve using computation — programs we write, not closed, proprietary systems — to generate texts.
The Mundus
N. H. Pritchard (1939–1996)
Ed. Paul Stephens
Primary Information, 2024
You need to have a copy of the printed (paperback) edition
Wash Day
Arwa Michelle Mboya (SM MAS ’20)
Counterpath, 2023
An artistic / poetic POD book
Each student is to buy/borrow a different one; one that is printed and bound.
The Library of Artistic Print on Demand is a great resource for finding
one.
We will each claim the book we plan to report on beforehand to avoid having two people with the same book.
Books are only one way we support our learning and our writing in class. We also have downloadable resources such as The Seeker, a PDF. Links to short writings will be provided throughout the semester; in a few cases we will even have handouts of such writing. There is plenty of code available for you online, from the very small-scale programs in Memory Slam 2.0 up into open/free software LLMs that you can (optionally) install. You will be shown short videos and provided with in-class readings and links to other projects.
20% - Preparation for and participation in class. This is a workshop class in which discussing your work and that of your fellow students is the core activity. The physical presence of your material being in the classroom is essential; you also have to have the items you need to participate, ranging from a laptop to required books. Participation requires reading aloud and otherwise presenting the experimental writing you have done; giving short presentations about the historical, cultural, social, and national contexts of different avant-garde movements; engaging in discussion that is informed by having completed the assigned reading; and doing writing (we undertake in-class writing exercises). Missing a class, with an unexcused absence, will reduce your overall grade by 10%, which will lower your final grade by one letter grade. Grade reduction for unexcused absences is not capped. If you miss four classes and your absences are unexcused, your grade will be reduced 40%. (Note: Absences for circumstances out of your control, such as health problems and family emergencies, are absolutely excused, as are absences for religious observance. You still will have to keep up in the course, so as soon as is practical, contact me and one or more other students to be able to keep up.) Presence and lack of participation (for instance, due to being unprepared) will result in a lesser grade reduction for each class. Last but not least, you are not allowed in enroll in 21W.764 / CMS.609 / CMS.846 if you are enrolled in another subject that meets at any overlapping time. Absences because you need to go to another class or an exam for another class are unexcused.
40% - Completion of the nanoprojects, short weekly assignments, in a way that shows an understanding of the computational principle, constraint, prompt, or concept and which works toward some innovation. Each assignment will be valued equally. Nanoprojects must be delivered in two ways for full credit: Emailed to me in a zipfile by 12 noon on the day of the class (yes, seven hours before class) and brought with you on your computer, ready for presentation.
40% - The kiloproject. This will be a bookwork which can (if you like) be computational. The framework for the project (form, concept, material) should be innovative and appropriate to the author’s goals. The scope should be suitable for a project that is the culmination of a semester of writing work. The writing (process and output) should be innovative. Some aspect of the completed project should be awesome. ¶ Any approach is all right to use, but if you take a computational approach, remember that we are investigating computing techniques rather than particular corporate products and services. So any system you use must be free/open; for an LLM (which you are not encouraged to use!) that would include GPT-J, GPT-Neo, and Mistral — and any such system used must be “pure” and without guardrails or an instruct layer, so you deal with the essential LLM and not elaborations.
This is a creative writing workshop class with a significant amount of text to be read (and overread). The class is structured, with the many smaller assignments (nanoprojects) specified by the instructor. The students may do whatever computational and/or experimental writing they like for the kiloproject, as long as it is of the appropriate scope. Although the schedule will vary somewhat from class to class, a typical meeting will involve the following:
0) Before the class meeting, participants will do assigned reading and writing in preparation for class. A few students each day will be assigned to prepare short presentations (no slide decks!) and to be able to answer questions providing historical context for our discussion.
1) Often near the beginning of our class meeting, just after 7pm, we’ll “sight read” some experimental writing that is new to us.
2) We’ll react in several ways. We’ll interpret and overinterpret the work, discover and admire particular techniques that were evidently used in their composition, and discuss how these techniques can be extended and used in other ways.
3) We’ll extend our discussion to cover the assigned reading. How can the works we just encountered change the way we read? Challenge conventional notions of writing? Make us rethink forms, English, and the subjects and themes of the piece? Would it make us think differently if we wrote in this way?
4) All experimental works we encounter, along with the techniques used to write them, are situated in history. Students will give short presentations at this point in the class meeting to provide historical, political, and cultural context. Note that these presentations come after we have had a chance to give an immediate reaction to experimental writing work, and to let the writing provoke us in its our own context today.
5) Around 8:20pm we will take a ten-minute break.
6) We’ll have a short in-class writing exercise inspired by the techniques of particular people, literary groups, or movements. We’ll share what we wrote with each other.
7) Discussion of student projects: One or more people will read their work aloud or otherwise present it to the group. It’s important to be respectful, which means more than just being polite: We will try to understand that author’s goals and, in light of those, suggest how to revise, reimagine, reconceptualize, add to, or cut the text to improve the work. Initially, will not ask (or allow) the write) to interpret or explain what is being expressed in their text, because we want to focus on the work and not any explanation of it.
While this will characterize many of the class sessions, some will have more time devoted to discussion of the book-length experimental writing that we will study. Some meetings will be occupied by kiloproject workshops. In those cases, the typical elements will be very abbreviated or some or all of them will be omitted.
Readings from & responses to experimental writing.
Due next class ... Nanoprojects: (1) Write a good sentence of exactly 100 words. (2) Choose a writing process, constraint, or form inspired by one of the readings I presented and, using it, write something of no more than one page. Do not repeat one of our in-class exercises; choose some process/constraint/form than we didn’t already use together. (3) Choose another writing process, constraint, or form (again, one that has not yet been used) based on one of the readings and, using it, write something of no more than one page. Reading: “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” by F. T. Marinetti (found online here, here), pages 3–4 of Finnegans Wake (handed out in class.) Other short experimental writing works may be assigned for reading this week or at any point along the way. If any other readings are added later in the semester, they will not exceed a few pages per week and will be made accessible six days before class.
In-class exercise: “S/T-word” writing.
Discussion of nanoprojects.
Discussion of “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.”
In-class viewing relevant to manifestos: FUTURISM and DADA from Julian Rosefeldt’s 13-channel video installation Manifesto, specifically.
In-class exercise: Surrealist writing games.
Discussion of Finnegans Wake, pp. 3–4.
In-class exercise, time permitting: Coin a word.
Due next class ... Nanoprojects: (1) Write a “mini” manifesto. Don’t write a parody of a manifesto. Think about what could seriously drive you and like-minded writers to write in a new way, and express this forcefully. (2) Pick one of your assignments 1–3 from the previous class, or your S/T-word story, and revise it. Start from scratch (as far as the text itself if concerned) if you prefer. Take each aspect seriously, so when you write a good 100-word sentence, write a sentence that is really good, an example you’d be proud to show off. When you write a T-word story, write a compelling, interesting story that goes beyond cleverness. When you use any existing constraint or framework, use it really well and ensure that your revision exceeds the original. (3) Play the writing game Question & Answer with a group of people you know — at least four rounds. (4) Invent another writing game along the lines of the ones developed by the Surrealists. Play it with a group of people you know — at least four rounds. Reading: All of The Mundus.
In-class exercise: The prisoner’s constraint.
Discussion of nanoprojects.
In-class exercise: Word palindromes.
Initial discussion of The Mundus, with a focus on the text and materials in the book. In future class meetings we will consider this book in relation to Umbra and visual poetry.
Due next class ... Nanoprojects: (1) Define (in draft form) your poetics. What are your motivations and goals as a writer and what do you consider good writing? No more than 500 words will be fine for this. This should propbably relate to your manifesto, but is a “soft” piece of wrirting, not a forceful one. (2) Pick a hard (as in difficlt) constraint from William Gillespie’s Table of Forms and write a good text using it. (3) Pick an easy constraint from Table of Forms and write a good text using it. (4) Based on what you have written/are writing for your statement of poetics, choose or develop your own technique or constraint and write something in it. Reading: The most difficult parts of The Mundus, again. All of Wash Day.
In-class reading and discussion of “Sonnet” by Terrance Hayes.
In-class exercise: Radical haiku.
Discussion of nanoprojects.
Discussion of The Mundus in relation to the project of Umbra.
Discussion of Wash Day in relation to blackness and YouTube.
Due next class ... Nanoprojects: (1) Write a sonnet responding to what Charles Bernstein calls “official verse culture.” (2) Choose a traditional form or one newly invented by another poet (e.g., the golden shovel) and write as radical poem in the form. (3) Write a short computational poem (no more than 1KB of code) that is radical. Reading: Poems by Augusto de Campos, all the ones linked there. Three untitled poems by Haroldo de Campos, linked there. Carnival, the first panel, by Steve McCaffrey. Introduction to An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, ed. Emmett Williams, to be circulated by email.
Note that “concrete” and “visual” poetry are not the same, as we’ll discuss. Your nanoproject assignments ask you to write concerete poems (for a reason).
Discussion of assigned and new concrete and visual poems.
In-class exercise: Place language on a page.
Discussion of nanoprojects.
Conclude discussion of The Mundus, in relation to visual poetry.
Due next class ... Nanoprojects: (1) Write three concrete (not shape!) poems that are each different sorts of experiments, and are for the page. Do not develop any “style” or make a systematic set of three poems. Try different things. (2) Write two computational concrete poems for the terminal window. Again, do not try to develop a style. Any programming language that runs in the shell is fine, but programs must be at most 320 characters, which is four 80-column lines. (3) Find a concrete poem, or something that you read as one, somewhere — an anthology, a single-authored book, a website, even a magazine advertisement — and bring it to class, printed out, along with an idea of why you find it interesting. Reading: ONEWORD, an anthology of one word poems by Paul Stephens, to be circulated by email. Johanna Drucker’s review of Craig Dworkin’s No Medium in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Due next class ... Nanoprojects: (1) Produce a blank/uninscribed/silent work and bring it to the next class. (2) Write eight minimal poems. These are to be eight individual poems, not one poem broken up into eight parts. (3) Complete two “probes” — explorations of what may become your kiloproject, each of at least one page and no more than three pages in length. This is not a project propsal. It is an initial attempt at the writing experiment you may do on a larger scale. Reading: The Seeker by thricedotted (Li Zilles) — you will have to determine how to read it. Also, review the parts of Wash Day you found most intriguing.
Student presentation of blank/uninscribed/silent work, from the front of the class.
Student presentation of and reading of each others’ minimal poems, using a document viewer.
Reading of selected outputs from Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023, eds. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort.
In-class exercise: A poetic bash one-liner. Those unfamiliar with the POSIX shell bash can proceed by modifying existing one-liners/
Conclude disucssion of Wash Day, considering it as appropriation art and computational writing.
Due next class ... Nanoprojects: (1) Find an existing work of computational writing online that has source code available (in a repo, in HTML/CSS/JavaScript on a server, etc.). Modify this project to make it your own. (2) Create a computer-generated leaflet or chapbook, using one letter-size sheet of paper. You also have a formal limitation on the size of the generating program: It is to be no more than 66 80-column lines. You will generate the text and designin and print this booklet. Bring five to class, to facilitate our discussion of your booklet, so you and I can both have a copy and three others can circulate during the discussion. (3) Prepare an oral report of 4—5 minutes about your POD book. Bring your book to class and we will be able to inspect it; do not prepare slides. Reading: your POD bookwork.
Student presentation on POD books, from the front of the class.
Discussion of other nanoprojects.
In-class exercise: Draft a highly detailed bibliographic description of your POD book.
Discuss, revise, and standardize these bibliographic descriptions.
Discuss other books from the LOAPOD, with a focus on conceptual writing.
Due next class ... Kiloproject: a complete and “working” first draft. If you are making a booklet, bring a mock-up of the book that you designed and produced. If you are making a work to be presented in a Web browser, have a functional version ready to show (and email me what you developed).
We may have a reading and/or writing exercise to warm up, but this class meeting will otherwise be entirely devoted to workshop discussion of your kiloprojects.
Due next class ... Kiloproject: revise. Also, research to find at least two examples of experimental writing that connect to your kiloproject in some way. Be ready to name these next class.
We may have a reading and/or writing exercise to warm up, but this class meeting will otherwise be entirely devoted to workshop discussion of your kiloprojects.
Due next class ... Kiloproject: revise. Reading: the two or more pieces of experimental writing you found.
Presentation and discussion of kiloprojects.
Due next class ... Nanoproject: (1) Develop a small-scale piece of experimental writing that responds to one of your classmates’ kiloprojects in some way. (2) Revise your statement of poetics, taking into account your experiences in this class.
Presentation and discussion of the nanoproject responses and statements of poetics.
In-class exercise: a concluding collaboration to be assigned.
You don’t have to submit your work to contests or publications to learn about writing or to be a writer. For those who are interested, I am listing a few opportunities related to MIT where you can submit work that could be relevant to computational and experimental writing. I only include opportunities where there is no cost to submit work. A list will appear below and may be filled in during the semester.
Plagiarism—use of another's intellectual work without acknowledgement—is a serious offense. It is the policy of the CMS/W Faculty that students who plagiarize will receive an F in the subject, and that the instructor will forward the case to the Committee on Discipline. Full acknowledgement for all information obtained from sources outside the classroom must be clearly stated in all written work submitted. All ideas, arguments, and direct phrasings taken from someone else's work must be identified and properly footnoted. Quotations from other sources must be clearly marked as distinct from the student's own work. For further guidance on the proper forms of attribution, consult the style guides available in the Writing and Communication Center (E39-115) and the MIT Website on Plagiarism.
I used an experimental writing technique called appropriation when I directly ripped off the previous paragraph from another source and included it in this page, without quotation marks around it and without telling you where it came from, as if it were my own writing. Why isn’t what I did plagiarism? For some reason it is considered perfectly ethical to appropriate text on a syllabus at MIT. In fact, instructors are told to do so! Be mindful that syllabus-writing and certain experimental writing practices, appropriate in a contemporary poetry context, may not be appropriate for scholarly writing and may not embody academic integrity in a traditional sense. As we will discuss this semester, this does not mean that experimental writers should operate without any sort of ethics or integrity. We won’t ignore the academic concept of plagiarism in this class; we will understand how appropriating text and, in certain cases, not explicitly stating one’s sources, is a method of conceptualist experimental writing that has a point to it.
The Writing and Communication Center offers free one-on-one professional advice from communication experts with advanced degrees and publishing experience. The WCC can help you further develop your oral communication skills and learn about all types of academic and professional writing. You can learn more about the WCC consultations at http://cmsw.mit.edu/writing-and-communication-center and register with the online scheduler to make appointments through https://mit.mywconline.com. Please note that appointments at the WCC tend to fill up quickly.
Information Systems & Technology (IS&T). As an enrolled MIT student you can access a variety of proprietary software at no cost, and, given my advocacy, use, and production of free software, I’ll discourage you from using such — use free/libre/open source software instead! IS&T also loans laptops to students: https://ist.mit.edu/loaner-equipment. If you have any technical questions about hardware, software, or anything IT-related, you can contact IS&T 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at: https://ist.mit.edu/help.
The Engaging Cluster. MIT’s ORCD (Office of Research Computing and Data) adminsiters the Engaging Cluster, which provides high-performance computing for all members of the MIT community. While students do not have to install a model such as GPT-J or GPT-NeoX, much less fine-tune such a model, it can be done using Engaging.
Laptop/Device Best Practices. You should have your computers/tablets/phones closed (if closeable) or turned face down (if not) and at the ready. When we (as a class) come up with a question that can be answered using cybernetic enhancement, I may ask you to consult these devices of yours. We augment our intellect in various ways during our class sessions, using networked computation, using books, looking at a screen, listening to recordings, and so on. For the most part, we will be augmenting our intellect by discussing topics with each other, doing, sharing writing exercises (usually undertaken on paper), and otherwise attending to the people in the classroom community. This requires close attention to me and your fellow students, so keep your digital devices closed/face down until we determine that one or more of us will consult a resource. I may ask that we write together using a shared text editor; I'll provide some advance warning if this is planned.
Citation Best Practices. There is useful information from the MIT Libraries about citation. However, this is specialized to how scholars rather than creative writers would and should cite. Our emphasis is on process rather than product, so consider the purposes of citation, and methods of citation, that may be appropriate to your writing methods. If you are coding, describe how you were assisted and what resources you consulted, whether this means describing your use of Codepilot or your finding a code snippet on Stack Overflow. You can include any way you received help in specific commit messages, for instance, if you are doing a project you have under version control. If you found an experimental writing technique either explained or exemplified, cite what you have based your work on. Although in general it’s fine to use a conceptual writing technique such as appropriation without citation — it would be quotation if you did that — for the purposes of your workshop you should explain your use of that technique. By citing your process, you help others in class learn about how they can enhance their writing processes.