Make your own cento!
The essential benefit of computation, broadly-speaking, is that it allows us to process more things more quickly; but the authoring of the systems and programmes that facilitate this can always be traced back to some initial human input or specification. However, once system and inputs have been built and specified, an enunciation can be generated purely mechanistically. This is the way certain online poetry generators work. Here’s one for making a cento, if you’re in the mood to play, from the Found Poetry Review. Or this one, an automatic poetry generator. Other tools like this, as well as great examples of writing that explores the supple, permeable boundary between receiver and creator, are abundant at the Electronic Literature Organisation.
Programmes like these poetry generators certainly allow the user to produce a cento at the level of surface structure; that is to say, at the level of material intertextuality. However, an engagement at the level of deep structure – or thematic generativity, as discussed in relation to Eudocia’s centos – is dependent on the interactor’s desire, interest and, arguably, aesthetic and analytical capabilities. But the question of automatic generation of cosi’detto poetry remains highly controversial. Is this simply automatised manipulation, and as such the opposite of the true goal of art, if we take Adorno’s definition of art as resistance, the dismantling of automatism in perception? From here we might also need to confront questions about units of meaning in art: what is the unit of poetry? Sound, word, expression or idea (such as a metaphor), line, sentence? What about the system that lies underneath the enunciation? Is this copyrightable? In music remixing and sampling, if you import the metadata behind a break, for example, rather than the phonic data, would you still be guilty of theft? (anecdotal debate suggests that copyright law is not yet clear on this one).
Maybe this brings us back again towards notions of ownership. Where is the locus of inspiration or judgment? Who is responsible for creating meaning, producer or consumer? Is poetry creativity (from nothing) and inspiration, or reconfiguration and aesthetic judgment?
New brain imaging technology might help us think about this in new ways. Helsinki-based collective Brains On Art, who use an EEG headset to read brain activity and an algorithm to transform this activity into words, suggest it is now possible to bypass language and conscious thought altogether in the generation of poetry. Here’s their video. Thinking of the unconscious (wave-producing) brain as original author and the conscious (interpretive) brain as mediator might shift the locus of human creative activity from creation to interpretation.
This is something we see to some extent in Dante, in his notion that writer is not originating author (God is the only true author), but instead as humble mediator or scribe. This is how the journeying Dante character explains his role to the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca, down with the gluttonous penitents in Purgatorio 24:
E io a lui: “I’ mi son un che, quando
Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo
ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando.” (Purg. 24. 52-54).
generating dante 