Aldon Nielsen, "Tray"
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, Tyrone Williams, hosted by Al Filreis, convened in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House, before a live audience, to discuss Aldon’s poem “Tray.” There are 29 sections in the poem; the group discussed the first 6. In the book titled Tray, published by Make Now Press in 2017, the title poem takes up the first 37 pages; the sections we discussed run to page 14. Usually, of course, we play an audio recording of the poem from we’re about to discuss as archived in PennSound, but on this day, because we had the honor of Aldon’s presence we asked him to perform those sections.
November 29, 2023
'or we could simply talk about poetry!'
The pioneering digital poetics of Loss Pequeño Glazier
For poet, digital artist, and scholar of e-literature Loss Pequeño Glazier, the intersection of the two — algorithms and poetry — has always intersected. He has done this pioneering work in the inception of the field as a graduate student and professor at SUNY Buffalo, and his book Digital Poetics: the Making of E-Poetries is one of the foundations in the field as the first book-length study of digital poetry published in 2002.
Thus the poet knows which lines the poem could contain but never which lines the poem will contain, these decisions made by the algorithm’s desultory logic. The output is clearly seeded by the poet, each permutation the product of human deliberation, linguistic invention, craft, play, and articulation of the poet’s vision — but the generation of a stanza occurs only at the precise moment of reading. A study in poiesis! — Luna Lunera, Loss Glazier