Procedural Writing is Kinky

Since I read Tom's post before writing my own, I now seem to be thinking about my response to him and about a question he raised whether he meant to or not. How is procedural writing like Oulipo, workshop writing exercises, detournement, appropriation, remix, collage, metagraphs (Debord''s word for poem-collage), erasures and other human made restraints placed upon writing different from computer generated procedural writing? What makes this murky for me is that computers are a type of person too because we made them and we program them.

Hartman says that the real question is, how can a computer and a human collaborate to create interesting writing? Although I think he has a fair point, I think it's a cute way to avoid the question and in the context of his project(s), that response makes sense. In "Sentences" (which could easily be renamed, "Making Computer Generated Poetry: A Love Story") Hartman takes us through a writing procedure much more difficult to explain than something like Perec's lipogram La disparition or Queneau's Exercises in Style (one of my favorites I might add). Yet the idea is the same: what fun things can happen when you put writing in handcuffs? Enter my gimmicky title to this post. Obviously those handcuffs are made of different materials, shapes and secured to different objects but the general outline is the same.

There was a lovely panel on procedural writing at the Boulder Small Press Festival a few weeks ago in which author Gillian Conoley discussed her experience with using the plot genie to write a book with the same name. The plot genie is a device that I took to be a wheel that the writer spins in order to put together different elements of a story. From the blurb on Omnidawn:

"The inspiration for this book is a plot-generating device created in the 1930s by an ex silent screenwriter, Wycliffe A. Hill. The original "Plot Genie"--used widely by Hollywood writers until the late 1950's--relied on a numerical game of chance, including a cardboard spinning wheel used to divine character traits and plot points."

Plot Genie is not a computer, it's a piece of carboard and yet we should note that the blurb calls the genie a "plot-generating device." A plot generating device sounds a lot like a computer but the genie is made from cardboard, not silicon. Someone did however, have to build it and program it with plot elements in order for it to function and create writing. This sounds exactly like computer generated poetry but had Hartman been there showcasing his computer generated work as procedural writing, I have no doubt it would have been more questioned that Conoley's. I think I would have, I think I do. So what's my/our problem with computers that we made and we programmed being used as restraints for writing? The answer is probably ignorance and code-awe (I made that term up). My mind can manage the mysteries of a cardboard wheel much easier than of a computer program. I am more interesting and more impressed by Janet Holme's "The Ms of my kin" which is an erasure of the already condensed poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Labor has to be a factor as I learned from last week's post. My classmate's were more impressed by my conceptual writing of alphabetizing the intro to UBU's Conceptual Writing anthology when they thought I had done it "by hand" when in reality I put it into a free online alphabetizing program. We are trained to be impressed with hard work, even if it's as tedious and dull as alphabetizing a set of words.

Finally, I think the question of why we choose to write within constraints is important. My students love workshop writing exercises and using constraints to force the artist into exciting and new directions is the aim of such exercises. My own teacher, Julie Carr is having me write a series of poems in ballad verse to force my language into something more rich and grounded. Oulipo functioned/functions in pretty much the same way.

So, why do we want to write computer generated, computer restrained poetry? Hartman says, "The brute-force effort to make a machine into a human poet seems doomed to death by boredom"(Hartman 4). But he does advocate as I have already mentioned, for the potential interest of poetry derived through human/computer collaboration. While going through a writing exercise like write the 100th version of the story in Exercises in Style, we learn something through writing through that restraint. We learn more about what we want from writing, our own creative process, about language itself and ultimately how to write a better poem/story. After reading "Sentences" there is no doubt in my mind that although his process is dressed a little differently, Hartman also learns these things. If that were true then computer generated writing is not alone, but living under the same umbrella of procedural writing as the plot genie, Oulipo and erasure; and the direct end results from such exercises whether computer or human generated are as Hartman points out, just as varied.