Digital Poetry: A Look at Generative, Visual,

and Interconnected Possibilities in its First

Four Decades
Christopher Funkhouser

By: Vishakha Khajuria

Keywords: Digital Poetry, procedural, multimedia, hypertext and cybertext,
e-poetry, cyberpoetry, computer poetry, unified proposition.
 The present essay is the 17th chapter of “A Companion to Digital Literary Studies” edited
by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens.
 This essay “seeks to reveal the development, range, and construction of digital poetry, as
well as, what constitutes the genre.”
 The “strongest definition” of digital poetry according to Funkhouser is given in the
introduction to the essay p0es1s: Aesthetics of Digital Poetry (with the “o” replaced by
the number 0 and “i” with a 1). According to this essay, digital poetry, “applies to artistic
projects that deal with the medial changes in language and language-based
communication in computers and digital networks. Digital poetry thus refers to creative,
experimental, playful and also critical language art involving programming, multimedia,
animation, interactivity, and net communication.”
 Funkhouser explains that this genre was launched by the poets who experimented with
computers in the 1950s. It’s an evolving process and has been developing long before the
advent of personal computers, and the emergence of the WWW (World Wide Web).
 The creative work in this genre can be categorized as – e-poetry, cyber poetry, and
computer poetry.
 According to the essay, “a poem is a digital poem if computer programming or processes
are distinctively used in the composition, generation, or presentation of the text.”
 Funkhouser gives examples of some digital poems like-“Computerized Japanese Haiku”
by Margaret Masterman and Robin McKinnon Wood, Jim Andrew’s interactive sound
poem “Nio” etc.
 The “spectrum of digital poems” is vast and thus it’s often a challenge to look at this
genre as a “unified proposition.”
 Funkhouser mentions the work by Catherine Daly- “The Fact on File Companion to 20th-
Century American Poetry” in which the genre is divided into three parts- “procedural”,
“multimedia” and “hypertext and cybertext.”

Introductory Overview of Forms:

Computer Poems:

Keywords: Computer Poems (CP), algorithm, permutational, combinatoric, syntactic

templates, Cyborgian poetry, text generators.
 Computer poems are, “generated by a computer algorithm, arranged as a sequence of
words, or signs and symbols according to programming code.” These poems “invite the
reader to participate imaginatively in the construction of the text.”
 They are either: a) permutational (recombining elements into new words or variations), b)
combinatoric (using limited, pre-set word lists in controlled or random combinations), or
slotted into syntactic templates (also combinatoric but within grammatical frames to
create an image of “sense”).
 Funkhouser explains that these poems are a combination of randomness with order. Such
alteration and experimentation have lead to the emergence of Cyborgian poetry (works
created by humans and digital machinery).
 He also states that it would be wrong to assume that a computer will write a Petrarchan
sonnet as good as Petrarch himself.
 The texts are not chance occurrences. They are “preconfigured to be randomized.” Poems
are produced by text generators with the help of a programmatic formula. But, computers
cannot give us perfect poems. The important element in “text generators” is that the user
or creator chooses the appropriate input text.
 There is a mention of the program TRAVESTY, written by Hugh Kenner and Joseph
Q’Rourke, which highlights the human input through the “imperative role” of the source
of the database on the computer-generated poem.
 This part ends on a quote by Brian Kim Stefans ( Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics),
“ Without ‘human’ intervention nothing can get into a CP (computer poem) that is not in
the database or acceptable to the program.”