I was delighted to be at the first NYU ITP Code Poetry Slam<\/a> a few hours ago, on the evening of November 14, 2014. The work presented was quite various and also very compelling. Although I had an idea of what was to come (as a judge who had seen many of the entires) the performances and readings exceeded my high expectations.<\/p>\n A reading I did from historical computational poetry kicked off the event. I read from a new set of reimplementations, in JavaScript and Python, that I developed for the occasion. The set of four pages\/Python programs is called Memory Slam.<\/i><\/a> It contains:<\/p>\n These are well-known pieces, at least among the few of us who are into early computational poetry. (Chris Funkhouser and his Prehistorical Digital Poetry<\/i> is one reason we know these and their importance; Noah Wardrip-Fruin has also offered a great discussion of Love Letters,<\/i> and Stephanie Strickland, who was in attendance at the slam, has done two collaborative poems based on A House of Dust,<\/i> one with me and one with Ian Hatcher.) Some implementations exist already of many, perhaps all of them – although I did not find one for A House of Dust.<\/i> My point in putting these together was not to do something unprecedented, but to provide reasonably clean, easily modifiable versions in two of today’s well-known languages. This will hopefully allow people, even without programming background, to learn about these programs through playing with them.<\/p>\n If I didn’t implement everything perfectly, these are explicitly free software and you should feel free to not only play with them but to improve them as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was delighted to be at the first NYU ITP Code Poetry Slam a few hours ago, on the evening of November 14, 2014. The work presented was quite various and also very compelling. Although I had an idea of what was to come (as a judge who had seen many of the entires) the … <\/p>\nLove Letters
\n Christopher Strachey, 1952<\/a><\/h3>\nStochastic Texts
\n Theo Lutz, 1959<\/a><\/h3>\nPermutation Poems
\n Brion Gysin & Ian Somerville, 1960<\/a><\/h3>\nA House of Dust
\n Alison Knowles & James Tenney, 1967<\/a><\/h3>\n