ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Poegram

Ok, I was so geeked when I read in "Cybertexts" about the poegram by Hopkins that I had to go and hunt it down. Hacker poetry I have seen before, which is more like an ASCII joke than a poem, but never a full blown program. The idea of poetry in a programming language intrigued me--though it was not the first time I encountered the idea. But to make it actually functional--that was impressive.

However, aparantly, it's more (at least in this case) a theoretically functionality. According to friends of mine, it references non-existant modules (I think that's a network thing, don't ask me, I don't know Perl. :)).

Still, it was neat enough that I thought it deserved a blog so we could at least nose it in class tomorrow:

#!/usr/bin/perl

APPEAL:

listen (please, please);

open yourself, wide;
join (you, me),
connect (us, together),

tell me.

do something if distressed;

@dawn, dance;
@evening, sing;
read (books, $poems, stories) until peacful;
study if able;

sort your feelings, reset goals, seek (friends, family, anyone);

do*not*die (like this)
if sin abounds;

keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
do not, I-beg-you, close them, yet.

accept (yourself, changes),
bind (grief, despair);
require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;
select (always), length(of-days)

#listen (a perl poem)
#Sharon Hopkins
#rev. June 19, 1995

-----

I am wondering if there are more of these out there--it wouldn't surprise me. I love it when art meets tech. My apologies that, with a cold at midnight, this is the best my brain can come up with in terms of stimulating thought.

Kell

ps - This is one example of hacker poetry:
(Caveat, it's probably a joke more than a culture thing, but I got a kick out of it.)

<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED

Translation:
"Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH."
--Unknown

Those krazy black & white hats. :)

Posted by Kelly at February 11, 2004 12:08 AM