PROCEED: a cookbook for poems

I’m excited to share a new side project. It’s PROCEED, a digital zine for procedural poetry.

What is procedural poetry?

Procedural poetry is any text that is generated according to a replicable procedure. Examples include John Cage’s chance operations, Christian Bök’s Eunoia, Darius Kazemi’s Twitter bots. A procedure is a recipe that a human &/or computer chef follows to cook a poem.

Why create PROCEED?

A few reasons! I want to promote an underrepresented movement in poetry. I want to push forward writing as a technology. I want to create new interfaces for reading and generating text.

What do I mean by new interfaces? Let’s go back to the cooking analogy. A good recipe interface consists of a set of instructions, an illustration of the finished product, and variations or alternate ingredients.

Accordingly, a good interface for procedural poetry should include the following 3 Ps:

1. Procedure. The mechanism through which the poem is produced.
2. Poem. The output of the procedure.
3. Parameters. Configurations that modify the output of the poem.

PROCEED aims to be a cookbook brimming with good recipes.

What will it look like?

I am still figuring that out. Something like this:

In a nutshell, every poem can be read, re-generated, and forked. It’s a complete picture of procedural poetry.

How can I submit?

Thanks for your interest! I am taking submissions here and will launch an actual website given enough interest. I hope to launch the first issue in January 2015.

What else do I need to know?

My plan is for PROCEED itself to be procedurally generated. The contents, the release schedule, & the price point of the zine will be automated and not entirely under my control.