When I was a kid we had a terminal hook-up to a main-frame at the local
college in our math class and were allowed to mess around with it.
We're talking eons ago, but we were taught the rudiments of Fortran (?)
or some such, and I remember making a ten-line "poem" with it that
garnered some notice. A bit later I read an interview with Jackson
MacLow in the old New York Quarterly said aha and made a poetry writing
"machine" that cranked out permutations of text in an arbitrary
manner--more like a game than a machine, I guess.
Am now reading about the old oracles and would suggest a long history of
chance generated "answers" to questions pre-Cage, pre-MacLow, pre
everything but history.
The Roman curse tablets also feature some pretty interesting sound poems.
More about that later.
Jess
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