COMBINATORY POETRY AND LITERATURE IN THE INTERNET

Since I have been asked to present my website Permutationsat this conference, this paper will first tell what the site is about and then address the issues it might bring up for the discussion of a poetics of digital text. The website ( http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/index.cgi) consists of a number of server-side computer programs written in the Perl programming language, each of them reconstructing – and thereby re-inventing – one of a few dozens of combinatory poems written between 330 A.D. and today by, among others, Optatianus Porphyrius, Jean Meschinot, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Quirinus Kuhlmann and Tristan Tzara. Although it is difficult to distinguish a combinatory literature from other forms of literature ever since linguistics defined language as a combinatory system itself, combinatory poetry nevertheless could be formally defined as a literature that openly exposes and addresses its combinatorics by changing and permuting its text according to fixed rules, like in anagrams, proteus poems and cut-ups. Frequently, written combinatory literature does not denote the generated text itself, but only a set of formal instructions with perhaps one sample permutation. Since the poems of Scaliger, Harsdörffer, Kuhlmann and Tzara fall into this category, they turn into something profoundly different as soon as their algorithms are being transscribed from book pages into computer software. The website therefore is an open experiment for finding out what might be lost and gained from such a transscription.Permutationsis, in my view, not an art project, but rather pataphysics and gay philology. 1