Al’s welcome to week 9 (aleatory poetry) for 2025

In the week ahead we hope you will join us as we read and  discuss  poems  composed by chance, by quasi-nonintentional means, by aid of computer program, by gamification and randomization, by deterministic processes!

You might be wonder how a course that takes seriously poems about nature’s beauty such as H.D.’s “ Sea Rose” and William Carlos Williams’s “ Between Walls” in week 3 and  Stein’s cubist carafe in week 4 could arrive at week 9 where poems seem so very un-natural.

Well, it turns out the “Sea Rose” and “Between Walls” were already redefining what natural beauty is and means. Neither of those poems is really a lyric in the 19th-century or Romantic sense of what poetry renders in its words. The week 9 poems actually derive from what those early modernists were doing when they composed poems.

If you tune in to our live webcast this week—Wednesday, at 10 AM Philadelphia time  HERE—you might be surprised at our natural passion for what these “aleatory” poets are doing, as an exciting evolution in the flow and continuity of modern writing.

 HERE again is your link to these chance-based and/or procedure-based poems in the main syllabus.

But there’s more: week 9 also presents you with the opportunity to  TRY YOUR OWN HAND at a chance-operations or process-generated writing! Yes, please try writing such verse yourself! I’m talking of course about assignment #4. Go  HERE to see the assignment as described. People will be writing/composing their responses to this fourth assignment, and then posting them  HERE.

You have two options. You can use the little computer program we’ve created—called the “ Mesostomatic“—to make a poem based on “source text” you enter into the application. Or you can read through Bernadette’s  list of writing experiments and pick one experiment and compose a poem that way.

Above I used the word “gamification.” Yes, the poets of weeks 9 and 10 appreciate gamified ways of writing poems as a means by which to lessen the effect of poetic ego and to keep their imaginations wide open.

For many people, this is all quite challenging. We are glad of that. The last thing you want a free, non-credit course to do is provide you expected conclusions and easily anticipated lessons!