While looking through the poems/games, I was quite intrigued by the rapid and spontaneous generation of text. Initially, I assumed that these poems were very random. However, Scott Rettberg explains that the use of combinatory poems expresses an unconscious collectiveness and helps inspire other digital media works. Another point made about the use of combinatory poems was the idea that these works are trying to fool people into believing that the computer/game/poem is actually communicating with them and generating works that cater to them.
I saw many similarities between “Love Letters” and “House of Dust” because they produced new stanzas of poetry about every 2 seconds. Sometimes the poems would be very moving, other times it was hard to comprehend these works. I honestly enjoyed these works because they allowed me to break free from the traditional poetic style, which is full of hidden meanings and deep emotions. These works allowed me to appreciate poetry and electronic literature in a different light. These combinatory poems forced you to understand these random lines and dive deeper than the surface level. They make you really try to find deeper meanings within the text.
The work, “Scholastic Texts” stood out because instead of providing a whole new stanza, it only generated a new line about every 2 seconds, to generate a poem that goes on forever. It is constantly changing the theme of the poem while also sticking to a strict pattern. I still see more similarities between “Scholastic Texts” and “House of Dust” because both works do not feel personal and are following a systematic pattern. On the other hand, “Love Letter” felt as if I was reading different versions of letters to give to someone or that someone gave to me.
In relation to the Twine games we focused on last week, these works are only similar to the forms of using a dark or colorless background. There is a clear difference of the lack of making your own choices and choosing your own path and the form of interactivity. The Twine games seemed to be internal exploratory while these texts are completely external exploratory. Twine games seemed more personal and allowed you to form quick connections with the text but these combinatory poems force you to make connections and aren’t personal at all. Despite all of this, I can appreciate combinatory poems as being a unique genre of poetry that allows the reader to be fully engaged because of the quick generation of new text while simultaneously losing the attention of the reader with the random pairings and spontaneous text.