Words Have Their Final Weapon: AI and Six Decades of Generating “Japanese Poetry”
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
There is a more than half century-long history of computer-generated Japanese poetry, ranging from global experiments in computer-generated haiku as early as the 1960s by researchers like Margaret Masterson, to “poem machines” in the 1980s by the avant-garde poet Suzuki Shirōyasu, to experiments with free verse poetry generators by early internet poets like exonemo in the 1990s, and poets grappling with generative AI in the present day. In this talk, I will explore the continuities of digital practices throughout this span, showing that present-day debates had lively precursors over the last several decades in Japanese scholarship, magazines, and poetry journals that remain largely unrecognized (including in Japan itself). In this talk, I will begin by exploring the fraught relationship between current generative AI discourses and the idea of “Japan.” I will then present a glimpse of the large archive of poetry generators in Japan I have been collecting for over a decade. By doing so, I aim to show how taking seriously this long and complex history of experiments in generative poetics in Japan can push against dominant and pernicious narratives of Asia as the “generatable other,” and point us towards a broader story of electronic literature beyond the “West.”
Words Have Their Final Weapon: AI and Six Decades of Generating “Japanese Poetry”
Algorithms & Imaginaries
There is a more than half century-long history of computer-generated Japanese poetry, ranging from global experiments in computer-generated haiku as early as the 1960s by researchers like Margaret Masterson, to “poem machines” in the 1980s by the avant-garde poet Suzuki Shirōyasu, to experiments with free verse poetry generators by early internet poets like exonemo in the 1990s, and poets grappling with generative AI in the present day. In this talk, I will explore the continuities of digital practices throughout this span, showing that present-day debates had lively precursors over the last several decades in Japanese scholarship, magazines, and poetry journals that remain largely unrecognized (including in Japan itself). In this talk, I will begin by exploring the fraught relationship between current generative AI discourses and the idea of “Japan.” I will then present a glimpse of the large archive of poetry generators in Japan I have been collecting for over a decade. By doing so, I aim to show how taking seriously this long and complex history of experiments in generative poetics in Japan can push against dominant and pernicious narratives of Asia as the “generatable other,” and point us towards a broader story of electronic literature beyond the “West.”
Bio
Andrew Campana is an assistant professor of Japanese literature and media at Cornell University. His first monograph, Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media, was published in 2024 by the University of California Press and won the MLA Scaglione Prize in East Asian Studies. His current project is tentatively titled Glitch Texts: Digital Poetics in Japan.