Found Wikipoetry
You know that Wikipedia link that takes you to a random Wikipedia page? I've always found that really neat. It kind of replicates the feeling of flipping through a book to see what weird or interesting things you’ll find on whichever page you stop at (this works especially well with thick books like encyclopedias, dictionaries, or Bibles). A book as a physical object inherently has that affordance, but digital media often doesn’t unless someone takes the time to build it in. So I always appreciate when people put in that effort to make it easier to digitally stumble across cool things that you might otherwise have never known existed.
I also enjoy making collage poems out of material that is not typically seen as having intrinsic artistic merit (see also: composing poetry from junk mail or econ test questions). So it occurred to me that random Wikipedia pages might make for a really interesting source of collage material.
Since large language model (LLM) tools have been such a constant topic of conversation lately, I’ve also been thinking a lot about collage poetry in juxtaposition to LLM-generated text. One of the primary (and, in my opinion, accurate) criticisms of LLMs is that they vacuum up other people’s words without permission, stick them in a computational blender, and claim the output as an original creative work; and that one or more aspects of this process is unethical. At a glance, collage poetry, whether analog or digital, has some similarities to LLM text generation! When I compose a poem, I am taking other people’s words (often without asking permission) and mixing them up into something that I would consider to be a “new” creative work. Because of these seeming similarities, I have been thinking a lot lately about what responsibilities artists have when making art that is very directly derived from others’ work.
Without going too far off on this tangent-- one principle that I think is important is citation of the original source material. Any collage art is sort of intrinsically in conversation with the original work from which it was composed, and I think it’s valuable to explicitly name the source material so that anyone looking at the derivative work can better understand that conversation. You’re missing out on so much context if you only see the collage in isolation. This is why, in my Wikipedia collage poems, I have included citation footnotes which link to the pages where I originally found each phrase. It’s partly just continuing a visual gimmick (the poems are formatted and styled to look like Wikipedia pages), but it’s also just a straightforward way to credit the original material. And maybe it will make some people curious to explore the cited pages (like, does Martha Stewart’s Wikipedia page really contain the word “Gnomes”? The answer is yes!).
I have finished a few poems now so I consider it finished-enough to be posted here, though I intend to keep making some more poems as I have time. I'm calling the project Found Wikipoetry (mainly because the names "Wikipoetry" or "Wikipoem" seem to have already been taken). You can read the poems, and some more information about how they were created, at the above link.
More collage poetry