The other day, however, he gave me an answer that made perfect sense. He said he spent his day trying to write in a language that doesn’t exist yet.
He’s a poet.
(Um, and being a poet is extremely manly. Only the strongest and most powerful of men can even manage to lift the smallest of limericks. Poets are never forced to eat tanbark as children because the kids who are going to grow up to be professional football players recognize a power greater than theirs. Yeah, that’s how it goes.)
Upon further review (I’m a football player, not a poet…), I think that computer poetry might be like haiku. It’s a concrete sort of poetry, full of active verbs. Its playfulness comes from numbers, like typing 07734 into an old calculator and flipping it upside down so it says hello. The emotion has to be implied, evoked, returned as an output by the wetware.
Apparently Goldilocks and the Three Bears exists in a Fortran version. Whatever the output is, I’m sure it’s just right.
