💿 ⌨️ ⛓️‍💥 🫧 🕸️ 🐾

tiny computational poems and poetic websites

January 30, 2026 at tiat / Instructor: Helen Shewolfe Tseng / https://coyote.computer/tiny

Welcome!

Show of hands, how many of you have:

Written poetry?
Written code?
Written poetry with code?

What is computational poetry?

Computational poetry is a subset of electronic literature, which encompasses the various genres and processes of writing that engage digital or computational capabilities aesthetically. Computational poems might utilize hypertext, animation, interactivity, algorithmically-generated or dynamic text, etc.

Computational poetry involves poetics on both the levels of:

syntax – the poetry in the code itself
affect – how the code works to (re)arrange language and produce creative expression

Computational poetry is a varied genre, and it has drawn from pre-digital/pre-computational poetic practices, including:

formal constraints, such as haiku, limericks, sonnets
avant-garde constrained writing, such as lipogrammatic writing that omits the use of specific letters, or the many practices of Oulipo members
generative modular text, such as Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes
visual and concrete poetry, which might depict an image likeness or use white space in intentional ways
conceptual writing and instructional/procedural text, such as the work of Fluxus artists
asemic writing, which may be semantically open, wordless, gestural

The School for Poetic Computation expands their definition of poetic computation to include alternate, radical, and critical engagements with computing, that reimagine its uses beyond the dominant patterns of serving capitalistic goals.

Tiny computational poems, through the lens of Taper

Taper is a browser-based literary magazine for small computational poems, published by Bad Quarto twice-yearly since Spring 2018. Each issue has a theme chosen by the editorial collective of the previous issue, which is often directly or indirectly relevant to the issue’s numerical index.

Taper’s first issue consisted of poems under 1 kilobyte (1024 bytes, or 1024 ASCII characters), and from the second issue onward, a recurring size constraint of 2KB per poem (2048 bytes) has been applied.

In addition, Taper pieces follow a few more constraints:

All poems consist solely of HTML, CSS, and/or JavaScript
Poems use no external libraries, APIs, or resources (including font files, images, links, etc.)

These constraints serve a few purposes:

Practical: Taper pieces are standalone and fully-contained in the 2 kilobytes of code, which makes them viewable without a network connection (for example, in gallery settings).
Creative: The choices one makes to reduce code to size while maintaining its intentions are not only challenging, but often poetic in nature. Adjacent to Taper is the demoscene, the subculture of coding tiny self-contained audiovisual programs, though Taper is perhaps distinct in its literary origins and focus.
Environmental: The weight of a website is relevant to its carbon footprint, and websites with lower byte counts typically consume less energy. Low-Tech Magazine is a good resource for learning more.

But you can do a lot within these limitations!

A tour through my past Taper pieces

A Compass of Lunar Trigrams (2022, for Taper #8: 8-Bit Nostalgia)
As the word “nostalgia” in this issue’s prompt derives from the Greek words for “homecoming” and “grief,” this piece borrows from the visual language of the octagonal feng shui mirror (a protective talisman for the home) and the compass (a magnetic wayfinding device originally invented in Han Dynasty China for divinatory purposes). The auspicious number 8 also appears through the ba gua (eight trigrams) of Taoist cosmology, and the eight phases of the Moon (culturally and linguistically associated with home, family, and timekeeping). UTF-8 encodes these symbols and emoji for the web, allowing them to be displayed here with minimal impact to the file size constraints.

K9-tailed (2022, for Taper #9: Nine Lives)
A durational visual poem that unfurls over time. The Chinese word for the number nine, 九, is a homophone for 久, a word signifying a long period of time; in Chinese culture, the number nine is associated with longevity and eternity. The mythical nine-tailed fox, originating in Chinese mythology and appearing in various forms throughout East Asian folklore, is said to grow each of its tails over a long lifetime, gaining shapeshifting abilities and magical powers with each one, and eventually ascending to the heavens after 999 years. As you remain on the page, the virtual canine’s tails, each formed by the 9 glyph, slowly fade into view, with each tail taking longer than the last. If you wait long enough, you can witness the fox transform into a golden celestial being. The poem reaches completion within minutes, but per our expectations for the web, the process seems to take forever.

X/十/10: Wheel of Fortune (2023, for Taper #10: Powers of Ten)
In the tarot, the tenth Major Arcana card is the Wheel of Fortune. Throughout history, people have turned their gazes toward the sky (天, ten) in order to divine their fortunes. This piece features a Wheel of Fortune drawn with the shapes of X, 十, and 10, all glyphs for the number ten, dividing the wheel into ten segments. A play on astrological charts, a spin of the wheel generates a visual poem in the form of a constellation of stars and words (the latter all containing the letters “ten”). The reader is invited to use this piece as a divination tool: inquire with a question or concern, interpret meaning in the generated poem, and gain insight.

Smoke Signals (2023, for Taper #11: Parallels)
A participatory poem that invites the reader to transmit messages to loved ones who have passed on to the spirit realm. The piece is a nod to wind phones, which make space for grieving visitors to hold one-way conversations with their dead. Referencing the Chinese tradition of burning incense as offerings to the departed, transmissions are rendered as ephemeral smoke, rising from joss sticks that gather in parallel with each message sent. The digital incense sticks appear to burn down and recede from view, mirroring our own brief timelines in our parallel sphere of the living.

FLUXIIS (2024, for Taper #12: Tools)
An instructional poem generator for experimental rituals, inspired by the participatory performance pieces of the Fluxus art movement. Each poem is constructed from lists of words informed by canonical dozens (the Western and Chinese zodiacs, the Greek Pantheon, the Twelve Days of Christmas) and the occult tools of the Minor Arcana (wand, cup, pentacle, sword). The instructions combine the mundane, abstract, and absurd, and invite the reader to use them as tools of their own interpretations. Roll the dice to generate a new ritual.

Coyote Spotting Simulator (2024, for Taper #13: Superstitions)
A game of sorts: 𓃥 Look for coyotes. Zoom in for a closer view. 𓃦 Attune yourself to subtle shifts and signs. 𓃢 Sit with the landscape as it changes over time. I share my city with a small population of coyotes. For a long time, I never encountered them. Often, they camouflage perfectly within their surroundings. Often, they notice me first, then vanish before I have a chance to notice them. Over the recent past, as my interest in coyotes has grown from fleeting curiosity to dedicated study, my senses have also adapted to better detecting them. Even so, every day I spot a coyote is a lucky day indeed.

Fieldnotes (2024, for Our Generation)
an earlier text version of the piece

Fieldernotes (2025, for Run Run Run)
a follow-up piece, inspired by Nathan Fielder

Field Sonata (2025, for Taper #14: Sonnets)
The word “sonnet,” deriving from “little song” or “little sound,” is etymologically linked to the word “sonata,” a musical composition structured in movements. This piece collects and disperses little songs and sounds as a spatial onomatopoeic sonata against a simulation of changing light and sky, a score for the ambient soundscapes naturally occurring on a particular stretch of wild land I know and love. Movements of movement, the ecological nested within the planetary. The duration of the piece, four minutes and thirty-three seconds, is an homage to John Cage’s 4’33”, and an invitation for the viewer to bring awareness to your own ambient soundscapes as you watch the poem unfold.

Of Mountains and Seas (2025, for Taper #15: Crossroads)
The Shanhaijing (山海經), or the Classic of Mountains and Seas, is an ancient Chinese mythic atlas and bestiary that has long fascinated me. Modeled after the Classic’s repetitive combinatorial descriptions, Of Mountains and Seas generates speculative hybrid creatures in imagined landscapes. The animals and attributes included in the beasts’ constructions carry associations with the folkloric Trickster, the mischief-makers and boundary-crossers who emerge during times of upheaval, who dance on the thresholds of new worlds in the making. In contrast, sacrificial beings draw from representations of the dominant and domesticated. Journey through these liminal regions to encounter the many tricksters and shapeshifters who lurk in the crossings.

Explore a Taper issue together

Form groups of 3-4.
Choose one of these issues: 13: Superstitions, 14: Sonnets, 15: Crossroads
View the page source to read the creative statements of each piece.
Examine the poem code, between the closing header tag and closing body tag.
Discuss!
- What do you think makes an effective computational poem?
- How does a particular piece engage with the issue themes on poetic, visual, and technical levels?
- Can you draw a connection between a visual effect to its poetic affect? That is, how does a particular aesthetic choice change how something is read? How does it change its emotional impact?
- Which poems inspire you to make something? Can you say why or how?

Writing a simple tiny code poem

Use CodePen (signup is free), JSFiddle (no account needed), or work from your text editor of choice.

Demo templates: CodePen, JSFiddle
* This demo lightly references three pieces by Nick Montfort: Taroko Gorge, The House of Dust, Idiolect

Some things to try:

Edit the noun and phrase lists
Add emoji or other Unicode characters
Can you add other language patterns?
Can you change the font size and styles of each line?
Can you make every generated line unique?
Try some native HTML elements
Add some CSS filters
Use JS to manipulate HTML/CSS elements
Play around, experiment, break things, try to fix them
Collaborate with your neighbor if you get stuck!

Making things small

There’s a poetry to coding with economy. How many bytes does your poem weigh?

Minimize repetition in your code, wrap reused pieces into functions
Rewrite functions in shorter ways, using shorthand notations and techniques
Choose shorter variable names
Minify code: remove line breaks, whitespace, comments, and other unnecessary characters
At last resort, reduce creative choices: language, visual effects, etc.

Links and final thoughts

There are many other computational poetry (and adjacent) projects, publications, organizations, and gatherings out there, including Electronic Literature Organization, The HTML Review, Crawlspace, Re•mediate, The New River, ORAL.pub, Ensemble Park, Game Poems, The LAOB, Backslash, Tiny Awards, WordHack, School for Poetic Computation, and more. It's also worth looking through the lists of editors and contributors of past Taper issues and exploring their other projects.

J. R. Carpenter evoked the term handmade web to refer to the portion of websites coded by hand and maintained by individuals, likening the practice to that of zines and artists books. Carpenter’s ethos of the handmade web advocates for ongoing active engagement with its making, draws attention to the body and the manual labor involved, and suggests slowness and smallness as forms of resistance.

I am an enthusiastic participant in the handmade web! All of my Taper pieces are also hand-coded pieces. I often imagine hand-coding going the way of hobby crafts like knitting, hand-weaving, or embroidery, which may be rendered “obsolete” by contemporary technologies (and “vibes” ??), but still retain the pleasures and principles that make them worth returning to as an artistic medium and process.

Thank you for attending!

I hope this has inspired you to write some code poetry, of any size.

Helen Shewolfe Tseng is an artist, designer, wildlife naturalist, and occasional computational poet based in San Francisco. In 2024, Helen joined the editorial collective for Taper, after contributing since 2022. For more signs of life, see shewolfe.co and @wolfchirp.