Aleatoric Writing: Poetry Generators

Aleatory is a fancy word for "random":

The composer and writer John Cage was perhaps the master of exploring aleatoric practices. What happens when the artist or maker constructs a process and the process makes the art without the artist's direction? Give up the idea of "authorial intention" and see what happens. Christian Bök writes about this in his essay "Notes Toward a Future Robopoetics."

Today in class we're going to make some purely aleatoric poems and some quasi-aleatoric poems using poetry generators. Each student will "write" a poem of their sub-genre that is purely aleatoric. Look for the button that says "Random".

The second poem you are going to "write" requires you to input certain information in fields. 

Save both of these poems and email them to me at csmith@dcad.edu

Name your file with your last name and the type of poetry you wrote. Example: smith_sonnet.pdf

If you want to generate another type of poetry, go for it.

This is a fast exercise. At 3:50 we'll begin our discussion of the results. Does this kind of writing have any kind of validity? Do we need the "writer's voice" to be present for literature to have value? Are these aleatoric practices fun but not so useful? Do all aleatoric poems start to look the same?

A couple of years ago while teaching a unit on Beat poetry in this class, I thought a Beat Poetry Generator would be fun. It was, but it wasn't what we initially thought it was.