Coding a Poetics of Love and Politics: On the Remixing Potentials of Christopher Strachey and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Poem Generators
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
The intersection of love and politics is a key concern of contemporary poetics. When the poet Jericho Brown writes that “every love poem is political, every political poem must fall in love”, I take this as a provocation to ask: what about poem generators? How is a love poem generator political? How can a political poem generator fall in love? Examining the works of queer coders Christopher Strachey and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram through this lens, I suggest that Strachey’s seminal love letter generator demonstrates a subversive potential in challenging heteronormativity in sexual politics, whereas Bertram’s Travesty Generator shows how honoring one’s creative lineages in political poems constitutes an expression of love. Strachey’s love letter generator takes its data from Roget’s Thesaurus; the fact that its romantic sentiment doesn’t strike as immediately significant is precisely a queer interrogation of normative expressions of love that is conditioned by a heteronormative political reality. Yet the algorithm’s combinatory process also opens up remixing possibilities that explore alternate relationships and realities. Building upon this potential, I look at the data in the code of Bertram’s “A New Sermon on the Warpland” from Travesty Generator. Bertram uses Nick Montfort’s Python2 code, itself adapted from the code of Alison Knowles and James Tenney’s “The House of Dust”, and remixes it using data selected from Gwendolyn Brooks’s corpus, which exemplifies this remixing possibility by invoking the poetic and algorithmic lineages out of which they code. Considering remixing as a poetic and coding strategy as seen in Strachey’s case, I argue that Bertram’s political poem generator “falls in love” by paying homage to the analog and digital poetic lineages from which it emerges, thereby turning it into what Eduardo Navas calls “a tool of autonomy” that addresses and resists the political reality of systemic racism.
Coding a Poetics of Love and Politics: On the Remixing Potentials of Christopher Strachey and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Poem Generators
Algorithms & Imaginaries
The intersection of love and politics is a key concern of contemporary poetics. When the poet Jericho Brown writes that “every love poem is political, every political poem must fall in love”, I take this as a provocation to ask: what about poem generators? How is a love poem generator political? How can a political poem generator fall in love? Examining the works of queer coders Christopher Strachey and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram through this lens, I suggest that Strachey’s seminal love letter generator demonstrates a subversive potential in challenging heteronormativity in sexual politics, whereas Bertram’s Travesty Generator shows how honoring one’s creative lineages in political poems constitutes an expression of love. Strachey’s love letter generator takes its data from Roget’s Thesaurus; the fact that its romantic sentiment doesn’t strike as immediately significant is precisely a queer interrogation of normative expressions of love that is conditioned by a heteronormative political reality. Yet the algorithm’s combinatory process also opens up remixing possibilities that explore alternate relationships and realities. Building upon this potential, I look at the data in the code of Bertram’s “A New Sermon on the Warpland” from Travesty Generator. Bertram uses Nick Montfort’s Python2 code, itself adapted from the code of Alison Knowles and James Tenney’s “The House of Dust”, and remixes it using data selected from Gwendolyn Brooks’s corpus, which exemplifies this remixing possibility by invoking the poetic and algorithmic lineages out of which they code. Considering remixing as a poetic and coding strategy as seen in Strachey’s case, I argue that Bertram’s political poem generator “falls in love” by paying homage to the analog and digital poetic lineages from which it emerges, thereby turning it into what Eduardo Navas calls “a tool of autonomy” that addresses and resists the political reality of systemic racism.
Bio
Tiffany Fung is a first-year MPhil research postgraduate student in English literary studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she also received a bachelor's degree in English. Her research focuses on computational poetry and digital erasure, as well as their intersections with race and queer identities.