Code Poetry Slam

In 2013, Stanford University held its first Code Poetry Slam, and its deadline for submissions closed on January 15 of this year. 

Looks like an annual affair to watch.

Here is the school's description of the event:

Stanford University's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) sponsors a series of Code Poetry Slams. Code Poetry Slam 1.0 was held on November 20th, 2013, and Code Poetry Slam 1.1 was held on February 27th, 2014, both in Wallenberg Hall, Rm. 124, at Stanford University. The following year, Slam 2.0 was held on January 23rd, 2015, also in Wallenberg 124.

What is "code poetry"? A C++ sonnet? A Haskell haiku? An algorithmic poetry generator? Something completely new? Check out our Resources tab for examples, theory, and other groups holding similar events!

Dawn of the Algorithm

Dawn of the Algorithm (Yann Rousselot)

Description from the publisher InkShares: "A picture book of 33 poems inspired by science [fiction], video games, books & movies, life in Paris and, above all else, the looming robopocalypse."

Humans Need Not Apply: Skynet Pieces Coming Together? « Karl Kapp

Humans Need Not Apply: Skynet Pieces Coming Together? « Karl Kapp:



'via Blog this'

Cortland Review Tribute to Kurt Brown

From the Editor's Note in the Spring 2014 issue of The Cortland Review: 

It is with enormous heart that The Cortland Review celebrates National Poetry Month and the life and work of Kurt Brown, whom we all miss, the beautiful posthumously-published I've Come This Far To Say Hello: Poems Selected and New, and the friends who made that volume possible. Kurt, it turns out, was everybody's friend. Endearing, warm, funny, charming, curious, empathetic, imaginative, big-hearted, and compassionate are just a few of the adjectives in the letters from his friends, the contributors to this feature: Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Lee Briccetti, Wyn Cooper, Stephen Dunn, Richard Garcia, Janlori Goldman, Andrey Gritsman, Kamiko Hahn, Steve Huff, Meg Kearney, Eugenia Leigh, Thomas Lux, Laura McCullough, Christopher Merrill, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Martha Rhodes, David Rothman, Harold Schechter, Charles Simic, Tree Swenson, Charles Harper Webb and Marty Williams. Each one of them has offered us a favorite Kurt Brown poem with a personal note about their choice. We accompany the poems with a slideshow reminiscent of Kurt's life--a favorite song of his running alongside--excerpts from his "Notebook," and an essay "Kurt Brown: An Appreciation," by David Rigsbee. 

A Tribute to Kurt Brown | Poets House

SNIP  From the Poets House announcement of a tribute to Kurt Brown:

Friends and poets gather to remember Kurt Brown (1944–2013), prolific poet, editor, founder of the Aspen Writers’ Conference, former Poets House board member, and beloved teacher. Award-winning author of seven full-length poetry collections, including, most recently, A Thousand Kim and Time-Bound, as well as chapbooks, translations, and a memoir, Brown was a tireless advocate for poetry, editing and co-editing numerous journals and anthologies. 

Verse and Universe by Kurt Brown (Milkweed Editions)

"Genome Tome" (2005)

An essay titled "Genome Tome" in American Scholar (Summer 2005) by Priscilla Long won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. Until 2013 Long wrote a weekly column for the magazine. 

If you construct a ghazal on a subject, so that each couplet chews on the theme announced in the title like a meat chopper, or if you violate the form by using slant rhyme—say, white/what instead of white/fight —or if you violate the rule of no enjambment between couplets, the form disintegrates. The eerie magic of the ghazal, its ravishing disunity, its weird indirection, falls to pieces. The thing becomes awkward, stiff, forced like a too-fancy, out-of-date party dress purchased at a thrift shop, which, besides missing a button, is too tight and unsightly.

I have committed God-awful ghazals. At first, I missed the point about autonomy of the couplets. Then one day I was visited by the muse, Keeper of Classical Forms. Perhaps she was sent by Agha Shahid Ali, who died of a brain tumor on December 8, 2001. He was 52 years old. 

I gutted my ghazals and began again.

Conference on Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science

At a conference held at the School of Language and Literature at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in January 2013, researchers met to discuss "Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science." The stated intention was to "lay the foundations of a new discipline, Cognitive Oral Poetics, through an interdisciplinary conversation between researchers in oral poetics, empirical literary scholars, linguists and cognitive scientists."

More from the program announcement:

The Parry-Lord research on oral composition in performance was arguably the major breakthrough in classics and oral tradition studies in the 20th century. The so called “cognitive revolution” has probably been the most important movement cutting across all the sciences of the mind for the past one hundred years, maybe more. Both paradigm shifts have an important point of coincidence: the idea that language learning and verbal creativity result from usage and performance, and build on general cognitive capacities and cultural context. The basic units of language and oral poetry are not a set of transformational or formal rules, but functional form-meaning pairs acquired through an instance-based process.