Essai

The Digital Reception of A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems

Jonathan Baillehache

Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (CMMP) was first intended as a poetry writing “machine” (“machine à fabriquer des poèmes”). Queneau used the word “machine” in his preface to designate a tool designed to help the reader compose his/her own sonnets. Immediately after its publication in 1961, poetry smitten computer scientists and poets interested in computer science digitalized Queneau's book. All computer portings could generate poems automatically, thus transforming CMMP into a proto-text generator. The digital reception of CMMP...