Permutational Poems
Created: 2025-08-04 (18:27:12) — Modified: 2025-08-10 (07:12:25)Status: in progress
I fell in love with generative and permutational poetry long before ever being able to program it myself, ever since a lecturer for my first-year literature major suggested looking up OULIPO
You do not need a computer to write poetry that shifts and changes. Raymond Queneau’s Cente Mille Milliards de Poèms (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) contains ten sonnets, each made up of fourteen lines printed on separate strips of paper, that can be recombined into 1014 further poems. And Florian Cramer finds renaissance antecedents, for example, in Ramon Llull’s system for composing philosophical-theological statements.
But using a computer does open up new avenues!
HTML Day
Travelling to Sydney
For HTML Day, my plan was to muddle around with some simple javascript. I had travelled to Sydney for this event, and a zine fair, and to just get out of my home city for a couple days. It has been the same bus ride up, my entire life, the same subtle shifts in the landscape headed north, the same roadside stops, the same last doglegging route through narrow city streets that were never built for buses.
At the same time you notice how things do change over successive visits, billboards pulled down, decrepit buildings repainted, new towers put up, even just how the city looks in different seasons. This shifting, ebbing quality seemed like a good subject for a prose poem!
Travelling to Sydney uses rudimentary javascript to continually regenerate the text, at a faster pace than anyone will be able to read all the way through. The early stanzas are relatively fixed, but things only get more unstable the further in you go. This is what travelling to and walking through Sydney feels like, to me.
To Sydney
I wanted to keep working on permutational poems after HTML Day ended. This trip was such a joy. I got to meet and work alongside lots of creative people. I holed up in my tiny hotel room one rainy night to code, write and eat too many oat bars. I spent time in grubby pubs that have largely vanished from my home city. I wandered all over the place for hours.
To Sydney is similar to my HTML Day poem. It even uses the same fragments. The text still regenerates faster than you can read, but there are more anchors to hold onto now. The poem is about having an alternate life in another city, imagining moving to it, and realising that to do so may only ruin the fun.
See also
References
- Bo, Max, 2025, HTML in Hyde, online
- Cramer, Florian, 2005, Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, Piet Zwart Institute, online
- Queneau, Raymond, 1965, Cente Mille Milliards de Poèmes, Gallimard
- 2005, Oulipo Compendium, edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie, Atlas Press, archived
Endmatter
Tags: @cybertexts @in-progress
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