Haylie's Week 2 Post

 Combinatory poetics is the oldest form of electronic literature, even though it is commonly assumed that hypertext is. It essentially randomizes words using computers that may put together words differently. Rettberg mentions how computation is often used in music, especially in modern music. He gives the example of "No less than a pop icon than David Bowie made use of computational generative techniques in the production of his music" (Rettberg). I find this interesting because I was not aware of how early electronic literature goes back and how vastly it can be used. Lyrics are a form of poetry so using the generative approach can be a good way for writing. Specifically, Bowie used a program which had the writer insert words or phrases and it would produce a new word or phrase. This can be very helpful to change a sentence to make sense.

I chose to reference Christopher Starchey's Love Letters. I think that it is clearly an old piece of e-lit but I think it still does a good job of doing the poems' meaning justice. It is continuous and I am not sure if it repeats until the site is closed but it generates a new poem every few seconds. I clicked around and it does not seem to be interactive. Even though it lacks the interactive aspect, it is still a cool piece of e-lit.