Digital Arts and Culture 2009

I discuss the four Perl poetry generators I have developed in the ppg256 series. My discussion of each program begins with the entire 256 characters of code and continues with an explication of this code, a description of aspects of my development process, and a discussion of how my thinking about computation and poetry developed during that process. In writing these programs, I came to understand more about the importance of framing to the reception of texts as poems, about how computational poetic concepts of part of speech might differ from established linguistic ones, about morphological and syntactical variability, and about how to usefully think about possible texts as being drawn from a probability distribution.