An Editor’s Note on the Computational Poetics Folio
This folio is a showcase of contemporary computational poetics featuring the work of Allison Parrish, Katherine Yang, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Ginger Ko.
Despite the recent AI goldrush and ensuing panics bringing computation and creativity into mainstream discourse, as Max Kreminski succinctly puts it, “Belief in computation’s creative potential has existed for almost as long as computers themselves.”
The tired rhetoric of the two cultures that pits the humanities against the sciences is a zero-sum game. The poets and writers in this issue refuse this false binary, and instead embrace the possibilities of inquiry. As Nick Monfort writes:
While the computer can have impressive results when used in such instrumental ways, it can be used for even more impressive purposes when understood as a sketchpad, sandbox, prototyping kit, telescope, and microscope. As a system for exploration and inquiry, there really isn’t anything else with the same capabilities as the computer.
The following editor’s note reflects on my own emergent interest in computational poetics, a journey that begins, ironically, with the oldest poetry, music. I offer this meander as an invitation to inquire into the ways you encode your own expectations and experience of poetry.
Editor’s Note
- First premise: This folio is a love letter to Edwin Morgan.
- Second premise: “Nothing is not giving messages”
- Third premise: poetry will survive your techno-panic as she survived the technological leaps of the alphabet, the printing press, the internet.
- First Premise, Encore: “CHANGE RULES!”
First Premise: This is a love letter to Edwin Morgan.
Edwin Morgan, 27 April 1920 – 19 August 2010, poet and translator, first Makar of Scotland (national poet), legendary collaborator and queer elder.
It would be impossible to summarize Morgan’s work, and as he said: “Who would not be impatient of categories?”
Besides, his work would not sit still in those categories for long, galloping instead from opera to science fiction, epic blank verse to camp mysticism, ludic nonsense to contemporary physics and technology. He translated Russian, Hungarian, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, German. Wherever Morgan’s writings range, though, “all celebrate the lyricism of science through the mutation of language.”
“CHANGE RULES!” he declared to be “the supreme graffito.” A mantra that would guide his radically democratic left-wing politics and his relentless playful and omnivorous forays into making sense of the world.
I first encounter Morgan’s voice in 2002, over the dying embers of Idlewild’s breakthrough album, The Remote Part. A cherished 14th birthday gift. As the fuzzed-out guitar crescendo fades into the album’s outro, Morgan’s clipped Glaswegian intones:
It isn't the mirror
It isn't on the page
It's a red-hearted vibration
Pushing through the walls
Of dark imagination
Finding no equation
A few months after I get my driving license at 17, I drive the three hours to Bristol to see Idlewild for the first time, their encore a deliciously torturous breakdown of guitar squall and a destroyed stage that, abandoned by the band, is filled with poem again:
It isn't in the castle
It isn't in the mist
It's a calling of the waters
As they break to show
The new Black Death
With reactors aglow
Do you think your security
Can keep you in purity
You will not shake us off above or below
Scottish friction
Scottish friction
Then, I leave for university, and find on the wall of the Scottish Poetry Library: NOTHING IS NOT GIVING MESSAGES. I change rules: this is the rule for me. A year after Eddie dies, when I am 21, I will get these words, the only words I have tattooed on my body, imprinted into my skin. I will not regret this tattoo.
Second Premise: Nothing is Not Giving Messages
“I’m more interested in what does change than in what has been and what is constant” Edwin Morgan said of his own work,a nd so in 1949 he began to collect news clippings on cybernetics and scraps of code. In 1968 he wrote “The Computer’s First Code Poem.” Here, the poet imagines and gives voice to a computer in a twelve-line block of text that mimics World War II cipher messages. The first two lines read:
TEYZA PRQTP ZSNKX VCFBO VJSDA
XSEVK JCSPV HSMCV RFBOP OZQDW EAOAD
There was no computer though, and the cipher was a literary trick that reveals a series of five-letter English words trapped in a coded cage. Nick Pelling decodes these first two lines as
prole snaps livid bingo thumb twice
dirty whist fight numbs black rebec
Particularly beloved is Morgan’s “The Computer’s First Christmas Card” which begins:
Jollymerry
hollyberry
jollyberry
merryholly
happyjolly
jollyjelly
jellybelly
bellymerry
Morgan’s computer poems, as writer Vlad Butucea argues, “decentre English and highlight alternative ways of making sense.”
To voice those alternate modes of making sense, to listen to them, is, to again, quote Butucea:
“A poetry that kicks things off false thrones and gives voice to otherness. Monsters, aliens, animals, computers–are all equal agents in Morgan’s universe. They speak, they act, they think. And, by decentring the human, and by giving a voice and a language to the non-human, Morgan engages in a deeply political act.
Third Premise: poetry will survive your techno-panic as she survived the technological leaps of the alphabet, the printing press, the internet.
Edwin Morgan: “I think of poetry as partly an instrument of exploration, like a spaceship, into new fields of feeling or experience (or old fields which become new in new contexts and environments.)”
Nothing is not giving messages.
Nothing–not the inanimate, not the animal, not the alien, not the machine–is not giving messages.
First premise, Encore: CHANGE RULES!
This folio platforms the rule-changing work of makers Ginger Ko, Allison Parrish, Katherine Yang and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram.
Ginger Ko’s interactive essay “Free Agent” is a psychopomp, a trickster guiding you to choose your own adventure and your own authorship. [This adventure can be experienced here].
Katherine Yang’s “A World Encoded” invites us to consider our daily coding, and how we make and remake our world with language.
Allison Parrish’s “Tasting Notes” computes collage to extremes, juxtaposing academic ideas of disgust against the luscious and hyperbolic descriptions of wine, whiskey, and coffee.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s “Lineage Anagrams” changes the rules of Edwin Morgan’s play with ciphers and anagrams, using anagrams generated by a Python program, including images that are stills from a moving program that randomly distributes the anagrams used onto the digital canvas.
“Maybe all I’m saying is that there could be different kinds of poetry.
CHANGE RULES!”
Edwin Morgan
NOTES
Robin Hamilton, Science and Psychodrama: The Poetry of Edwin Morgan and David Black, (1982).
Max Kreminski, “Computational Poetry is Lost Poetry,” (2024).
Nick Montfort, Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities, (2021).
All Edwin Morgan quotes from the Edwin Morgan Archive at the Scottish Poetry Library.