Le poème perpétuel

Text and voice : Fortner Anderson
Programming : James Schidlowsky

Le poème perpétuel  is a digital poetry work that presents the listener with a continual (and almost perpetual) flow of poems in real time. Each 10-word poem is generated by the program from a new random combination, and is read aloud in the author's voice. There are 10 billion possible poems, and would take about 6971 years of continuous listening to hear them all.

Each poem is created from a matrix of 100 words divided into 10 rows and 10 columns. The choice of each word, according to its position in the matrix, was determined by certain syntactic and poetic constraints. For example, the 10 words in row 1 are all adjectives of four syllables, and in row 2, each word is a noun of three syllables, and so on.

It was presented at Centre d'art et de diffusion CLARK in Montreal for the fall 2018 edition of their audio listening post.