The word “poetry” still carries historical, Romantic associations with “emotions recollected in tranquility.”  In the general imagination, nothing could be further from the poetic than machines. And yet, for a hundred years, avant-garde writers have been exploring the intersection of technology and art. 

One can get the background though books like MIT’s New Media Reader, the Electronic Literature Association, and the Electronic Book Review.  The Center for Literary Computing held a stimulating NSF Codework workshop last year specifically on writing “code” in both the poetic and computing senses. This gathering started me thinking on the differences between producing digital compositions using highly developed applications like Macromedia Flash and working more directly with a scripting language.

So, in an effort to explore this, I’ve been working through an introduction to PHP programming.  Here is my first study in code poetry. http://sherwoodweb.org/hybrid/codepoems/codepoem01.html