Richard W. Bailey (ed.): Computer Poems (1973)

A collection of early computer-generated poetry gathered by Richard W. Bailey.

“At the beginning of this century, Stephane Mallarmé published a slogan for modernism: A throw of the dice will never abolish chance. Chance is not abolished by the computer’s randomizing power but is re-created in different terms. The poet-programmer finds this power a tool to create a new set of dice, multi-faceted and marked with elements of his own choosing.

Yet the new battle to free language is fought on familiar battlefields: concrete poetry is reflected with a computer mirror in the poems of Leslie Mezei and Greta Monarch; pure poetry of sound in the verbal orchestrations of Archie Donald and Noreen Greeno; imagistic poetry in the juxtaposition of the unfamiliar by Charles Forbes, James Runner, and Robin Shirley; syllabic organization in the haiku of Margaret Chisman, Robert Gaskins, and John Morris; and the imposition of order on disorder in the poems of Marie Borroff, Pete Kilgannon, and Louis Milic. From all of these varied efforts a new convention has already arisen that allows poets like Edwin Morgan the scope to simulate computer poetry without recourse to the machine.

The Potagannissing Press takes pleasure in the publication of the following collection of poems, an edition of computer-assisted literary works executed in Britain, Canada, and the United States.

The occasion for its publication was a symposium on the computer in the arts held at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in May 1973, an event sponsored by the Academy, the Bloomfield Art Association, Eastern Michigan University, and the University of Michigan, with the support of the Michigan Council for the Arts.” (from the preface)

Publisher Potagannissing Press, Drummond Island, MI, 1973
53 pages
via xfoml

Commentary: Matteo D’Ambrosio (Matlit, 2018).

WorldCat

PDF (7 MB, page warble is due to the book copy’s poor condition)
Internet Archive