Combinatory Poetics (Kira Littlefield)

    According to Scott Rettberg in Electronic Literature, "Combinatory poetics emerged in twentieth-century avant-garde movements, further developed in poetry generators in the early history of computing and remains today an essential mode of practice in electronic literature" (Rettberg, 20). Combinatory poetics have a lot of historical and present purpose, as it is "the oldest genre of electronic literature" (Rettberg, 20). Knowing all of this it seems that combinatory poetics is one of the main aspects in the development of electronic literature. Rettberg mentions that "like most forms of electronic literature, generative poetics emerge not only from cultural but also from electronic contexts" (Rettberg, 30). Its interesting to hear how computers and or other electronic devices are evolving everyday to have more human like language when developing text. "Combinatory poetics can result in strange, uncanny, and beautiful texts resulting from an amalgamation of human and machine intelligence and serve as heuristic devices to help us better understand computation" (Rettberg, 53). Scott Rettbergs statement here seems to fully sum up combinatory poetics in a simplistic way. Basically, while combinatory poetics can have some interesting results these results help us understand computers or computation in a better way. While we did explore Electronic Literature we also explored Cent mille milliards de poèmes. During my exploration of this website I assembled by own poem, and while the poem may not make to much sense, it was fun to try to make the lines in the poem somewhat understandable. 

    In Electronic Literautre, Rettberg talks about "Bots" especially the ones associated with Twitter. He mentions the everyword bot by Allison Parrish. The goal of this bot was to tweet every single word in the English language. It took about seven years to have this bot complete this goal. Allison Parrish even has a website to learn more about her everyword bot.