In Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg asks the reader to consider the form of the procedurally generated poems and love letters that he presents. He is concerned, largely, with the fact that these poems are written with little authorial intervention, yet the reader is still able to parse meaning out of them. Despite many of these works using a type of programming where a predetermined part of speech is slotted into a preexisting structure, the reader can still create meaning from the work. Moreover, these poems are also fleeting.
Many of the poems we looked at only exist for a brief period of time and cannot be remade in the same way. All, except the second implementation of “Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator,” function as an infinite scroll upward where for every new implementation or line a previous one is lost.
This fleetingness furthers the feeling of uniqueness to the poems. In “House of Dust,” with every new line, one line from a previous stanza is erased. Because you cannot scroll back through the entire log of stanzas generated, even if you have repetition, it is difficult to notice. Similarly, with the first implementation of “Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator,” there are limited options, but each letter feels different because you are only able to see four at a time. Within the limited context, each letter or poem can be interpreted differently based on others around it. Thus, even if you do get an exact repetition, the context in which it is presented is still radically different.
This final point is perhaps more apparent in “Stochastic Texts” by Theo Lutz. This poem is a single, continuous stanza made from excerpts of Franz Kafka’s writing (Rettberg, 33). Not only does this poem continually scroll, but having the surrounding lines affect how the reader interprets and understands the symbols presented. Because of its form, the reader expects there to be meaning, even if none really exists. Thus, in using surrounding lines, the reader begins to create meaning for the work. While lines can be repeated because of the limited options within the work, the chance of having the entire screen repeated again is very small. Thus, despite the limitations on the variation of language, the continuous scroll function keeps the work from becoming repetitive and stale.