Three Poems
“Concrete Perl”, “The Two”, and “Through the Park” engage language on the level of the letter, the word or phrase, and the sentence. All are written under constraint: “Concrete Perl” is a set of four 32-character Perl programs, while the other two were originally written as 1 KB Python programs and were later ported to JavaScript for use on the Web. No external sources of data are used in any case: Those characters or strings used as data are included in 32 characters of Perl and the 1 KB of Python. In writing these programs, I have tried to explore what very basic sorts of computation can accomplish when brought up against language at these different levels.
Natalia Fedorova’s Russian translations of the three poems can be found at Сетевая словесность.