Poetry Machines: Technologies of Poetic Composition

Poetry has a long and fascinating relationship with technology that bridges the apparent gap between the humanities and sciences. The printing press, the typewriter, and the microphone have each offered radical new formal possibilities to poets, while the digital age has yielded computational methods for generating verse that challenge our basic understandings of the creative process. This talk reports on a project to survey the long history of poetry machines and communicate the neglected story how the precepts of science, engineering, and mathematics have been used to make and shape poetry.