Scott Rettburg discusses the history of combinatory poetics by analyzing some noteworthy works like “Love Letter Generator,” “Stochastic Texts,” and “A House of Dust.” These pieces of literature all produce their content through a programmatic procedure where lists of words are inserted into a standard sentence structure. High quality writing was never the goal of these early combinatory literature producers; instead, these works were meant to highlight how computing could produce literature with meaning and diverse variable outcomes.
Combinatory literature is not always as poetic or even as coherent as the programmer would hope. Lutz’s “Stochastic Texts” often produce sentences that make little sense at surface level, such as “every laborer is narrow.” This is because the combinatory algorithm is imperfect and does not account for linguistic trends and meanings. However, I think producers exploit this element of combinatory literature; ambiguous or ‘meaningless’ sentences result in a greater variance in reader interpretations of the text. Text that provokes thought in the reader is characteristic of poetry.
Some of the earliest origins of combinatory poetry come from the Dadaist movement and their methods of poetry creation. Words were cut out of a newspaper and picked at random to be used in a poem. I have personally used this technique several times, either for poetry subjects in English classes or for subjects in magazine collages. In both cases, picking words at random reveals unique outcomes that might not have been formed by human thought; I call it artificial creativity. However, artificial creativity is still creativity.
Falling close to the idea of creativity is originality. The randomized combinations of text allow for completely unique sentences, at least in relatively complex combinatory algorithms. In a way, this mirrors the creative processing system of a human writer, who is sifting through the text possibilities in their own mind. For this reason, it can be difficult to differentiate a work created by a computer and one created by human hands. I especially see this in “Love Letter Generator” where I could be convinced that any of the love letters were written by a human.