Poetry and the Algorithm

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We still use the phrase “Big Tech” in some contexts—it has a righteous, trust-busting ring to it—but down off the soapbox, we’re more likely to gesture toward the algorithm. This usage is less of a structural protest, more of a vibe check: with a shrug, or a shiver of weirdness, we acknowledge that the line between digital life and daily life has become porous. Specifically, when we point to the algorithm, whether re: social media, advertising, or surveillance, we’re making a claim about relative agency, and how in control we feel over our own actions. If I complain over breakfast about sleeping poorly, then encounter a video about sleep hygiene, then am fed an ad for a mattress, then buy melatonin gummies, might the weirdness be worth the payoff? If a doomscroll loop nudges me toward radical political positions, which I then parrot on Reddit, am I really the one responsible when I get put, automatically, on a watchlist? Take these vibes far enough, and we end up with a rather novel idea of the self, in which individuality works as a wrapper for a certain statistical profile. 

Most of us understand more or less how the algorithm works: it collects and parses our past interactions to build a model of who we are, then uses that model to predict and guide future behavior. This knowledge is mildly empowering in the abstract, but impossible to live by. Acting on it would mean paranoia: making a continual effort to disguise one’s true self online, trying to think like an algorithm so as to evade it. More often, we push that knowledge to the back of awareness until a moment of uncanny recognition reminds us the algorithm has been listening all along. Call it low-key anagnorisis. 

This flashing back and forth from lived experience to its abstracted digital shape is one of the characteristic rhythms of contemporary consciousness. In literature, this double awareness is key to the so-called millennial or online novel. Novels by Lauren Oyler (Fake Accounts), Tony Tulathimutte (Rejection), and Patricia Lockwood (No One is Talking About This) explore the effects of this doubling on attention spans, loneliness and relationships, consumption patterns, and politics. The novel is well-suited to dramatize these effects as they play out in the social realm; conversely, poetry’s inward attention to the workings of thought and feeling makes it a valuable tool for exploring how the algorithm reshapes agency, desire, and selfhood. While the poetry collections gathered here all focus on the effects of the algorithm on individual consciousness, the effects they trace are as varied as that catchall, algorithm. What unites them is a willingness to explore the furthest consequences of this new enmeshment with the machine. They ask if paranoia might be the appropriate response and if thinking like an algorithm might transform how poems look and work.  

The answers developed in these recent collections are representative of a broader trend that we might call algorithmic poetics. Work that falls under this rubric pairs a thematic concern about the creep of algorithmic tech into the private sphere with formal innovations that “disrupt” traditional features of lyric poetry (e.g., a coherent speaker and audience, representation, epiphany, figurative language). These formal innovations, such as the spreadsheets, sprawling lists, instruction manuals, and electrical diagrams discussed here, highlight the overlapping domains of so-called creative writing and programming or mechanical reasoning. One of the consequences of this is that some basic hierarchies no longer apply. In algorithmic poetry, mediated online experience is as vivid as physical reality, and the poem becomes just another virtual space. Whether we should continue to privilege the human as a category remains an open question.  

The tone of this refusal is matter-of-fact, not ironic: these poems reflect the world as it is now, without mourning lost privileges or projecting unlikely futures. Their prevalent interest in the contemporary manifests in plain, shareable diction; indeed, common strategies include mimicking different varieties of online speech and tactical code-switching,  spurred by an awareness of online surveillance. Bleak as all this collapse of boundaries may seem, on the page it often has a thrilling DIY energy. Poetic experimentation, which necessarily asks patience from the reader, compensates by offering a conspiratorial invitation to the maker space. 

Mechanical features on the page and in language are thus set up as an antidote to humanist pieties that have come to feel shopworn or toothless. This turn activates the numeration and accounting that undergird poetic thinking in the first place. When we become aware of the regular stress of meter, or of the repetition of structures, we are reminded that language is an alien, patterned material, out of which the self, however intimate it may feel, must be continually remade. Historically, technological revolution has been accompanied by an imagination of the human as a construct, and a parallel return to rule and order in poetry. Pope understood his fluency as deriving from an innate talent for “numbers,” and human freedom as rather overvalued; for Swift, figuring the spirit as a mechanism was a way of unmasking the obfuscations of false philanthropy. Meanwhile, writing against the Reagan-era military-industrial complex, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets leaned on technical jargon and alienated syntax to interrupt the frictionless meaning-making on which, they argued, the hypocrisies of American imperialism depended. 

What sets this contemporary movement apart from its precursors, and what prompts this essay, is the way that race—and the politics that follow from it—make these cognitive questions corporeal. It’s not a coincidence that the poets most invested in the risks and possibilities of bringing the algorithm into their work write from identities highly visible to the state; the authors of the collections at hand identify as Affrilachian (Keith Wilson), Palestinian-Australian (Hasib Hourani), Palestinian-American (Edward Salem), and Lebanese-American (Maya Salameh). Despite all the handwringing in the age of AI about defining and defending the human against the machine, thinkers of color have long recognized that humanism, by promulgating an unmarked ideal, has been one of the key instruments of racialized oppression. Sylvia Wynter has noted, further, that whether or not a certain population gets understood as human has a lot to do with changing economic structures: when labor can be exploited more efficiently by wage-serfdom than slavery, theoretical categories begin to shift. 

In this century, those most likely to be excluded from membership in the universal are the Black and the Palestinian¹. As Hasib Hourani points out, this symbolic exclusion is now literalized by an algorithm, which parses online communications and autonomously assigns individuals a security risk value². So, when the authors of these collections use tools native to logic, computer science, mathematics, and engineering, they do so with an ambivalence. While these forms and ways of thinking participate in the oppression and dehumanization of racialized others, they also deconstruct the pernicious idea of the unmarked human that lies beneath liberal discourse. 

These two critiques of liberal humanism—one from mechanistic and experimental poetry, the other from Black and postcolonial studies—come together in the two forebears most important to these contemporary collections. Most proximate is Lillian Yvonne Bertram’s Travesty Generator, an influential 2019 experiment in computer poetry. Bertram, who is Black, heavily modded source code by Nick Montfort, a White man, transforming his clean, Oulipian permutations into shaggy, crashy variations of “I can’t breathe.” Presented with the uncanny repetitions of Bertram’s text, the reader works to deduce a coherent computer code / code of justice, and becomes aware of how murders like Eric Garner’s, which are presented as a tragedy or a glitch of justice, are in fact its rule. 

The other important ancestor is Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse (1980/1989), a touchstone of diasporic Arab poetry, which offers a model for how experimental poetry can militate against political horror without depending on the kind of stable subjectivity that is one of the first casualties of trauma. Adnan’s work takes the form of a surreal primer that has to write and scratch away and rewrite even the most elemental components of language—“sun,” “rock”—to express the ways that genocide shatters communication and, with it, any stable real. Adnan’s text, too, is disfigured by technological surveillance and mediation. As the violence of the poem increases, so does the staccato frequency of the imperative STOP (“The sun has its mouth stitched with barbed wire STOP butcher’s Arab sun”, IX), which asks to be read both as a failed imperative (the poem and the horror continue) and as the alienated signature of the telegram incorporated into its tissue. 

Keith Wilson, Maya Salameh, Hasib Hourani, and Edward Salem all adopt techniques from Adnan and Bertram, ranging from primer-esque redefinitions such as Hourani’s attempts to pin down “it” and “thing,” to Wilson and Salameh’s use of computer code to talk about race. More deeply, for these poets concerned with the algorithm, Adnan’s and Bertram’s earlier correlations of experimental poetics and identity-inflected politics teach how incorporating the painful disruptions produced by technology into poetry can detach those most personal of values—identity, responsibility, affect, political stance—from an individual speaker. When these become semi-impersonal values, they can circulate, and may function as the grounds, however ephemeral or mediated, of a new kind of sociality.

Keith Wilson: if (form===trap)

Keith Wilson’s background in game design is reflected in Games for Children’s flowcharts, matrices, and rogue sine waves. As such, the algorithm, for Wilson, signifies as a tangible series of operations and logical moves, not as a mystified code. Indeed, the book functions as a primer in learning to think like a machine, prompting the reader through nested binary conditions toward aporia that reflect on the conditions of American subjectivity. What were for Adnan tools for expressing a genocidal state of exception—a fragmentary speaker, alienated language, the reliance on graphic interruptions—are here presented as the conditions of daily existence. For Wilson, this does not mean acute trauma has become permanent, but rather that the available forms for representing death and trauma have been slowly emptied of their force by repetition. This iterability, privileging structure over content, drives “American Lyric”: 

The simultaneity of vacuousness and motion seems to be the point. Inherent in the diagrammatic form is the argument that experience is ultimately diagrammable, permutations of a few variables, a repetitive paint-by-numbers affair. This is underscored by the hollow title, the urgent, empty questioning about “today,” “nowness.” The fact that these terms ask to be filled is far more important than whatever data attaches to them at any given moment. In this recursive, mechanical structure, anything the speaker desires (suicide) or says is meaningless: “everything is the same.” This repetitive passage is mirrored in the unfreeness of the reader’s experience of the poem, which, so clearly arrowed, becomes tightly circumscribed, the eternal return of an unanswerable “nowness.”      
It is a harsh irony to title an algorithmic flowchart poem such as this a “lyric.” The regulative interpretation it demands forecloses the fiction of the lyric as free effusion or natural speech, and limits our ability to read the poem as an act of communication³. Instead, as with Claudia Rankine’s 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, which also presents itself as an “American Lyric,” even the slow intimacy of poetic reading takes on the flatness of mass communication. This denaturalization is most jarring in “Uncanny Columbine,” which, under an epigraph by Louise Gluck (“I cannot go on restricting myself to images”) constructs a visual approximation of the flower out of brackets, parabolic functions, virgules, and stress marks. The image is literalized into an edged, constructivist diagram framed by disembodied commentary.

The disorientation of encountering a poem that looks like this, and then trying to locate ourselves in its centripetal space, is its central emotional fact. I find my way in through the violence in the framing lines, which hint that this columbine contains also the mass shooting at Columbine (1999). Seeing that equivalence of shooting and blossom helps make sense of the mathematical symbols (edged, discrete) and parabolas that compose that flower, and draw a parallel between American appetites for prettiness and violence. Like this poem, some of Wilson’s boldest visual experiments, including “Uncanny Emmett Till” and “Uncanny Pump Fake,” lean on the Freudian idea of the uncanny to flag the strangeness imparted to the reader’s experience as it is torqued by mathematical notation, racialized logic, and the collapse of reading norms. In all of them, initial disorientation resolves, chillingly, into the recognition that these extravagantly impersonal and technical structures are pointing back at too-familiar referents, like the extrajudicial murder of Black men. Still, Wilson’s thorough assimilation of the logic of domination into the poem may encode a kind of hope. By vamping hyperrationality and pushing logic toward farce with diagrams that don’t clarify, by surrendering to some degree to the code, Wilson becomes able to signify on it, and purchases a minimal opacity to its eye. 

Maya Salameh: function litany()     

Such an act is part surrender, and part espionage, and it characterizes also Maya Salameh’s How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave. The book’s first poem, “cast.html,”⁴ enacts this by presenting, in a table of variables, several contradictory definitions of “algorithm.” Foreshadowing the collection’s interests in metaphorical structures drawn from Christianity, the algorithm is defined both as “a sacred object. it summarizes,” and as “a computer’s admission to blood.” If the table form of the poem tacitly acknowledges that machine language is the master code of this historical moment, by populating that table with fragmentary, contradictory definitions, Salameh interrupts that code and produces a site that crashes itself instantly. 

Throughout the collection, Old Testament logics of blood sacrifice and questions of patriarchal authority are graphed alongside technological surveillance and corporate control. This is perhaps clearest in the act of surrender staged by “Songs the Algorithm Knows About Me,” which recapitulates different kinds of data and metadata—triangulated location, browsing and search histories, links to listicles, recovered emails from a hard drive, etc.—the poem is a way of offering up to the god that which the god already knows.

Unlike the other poets gathered here, Salameh retains an investment in tonal sincerity, however circumscribed by modernity, and in values like beauty and music; these offer sensuous appeal and valuable resting places for the reader. Because the poem counterpoints these values with “data,” a depth metaphor emerges, which privileges the sincere and the inward (“bread”, “onions”, “mother”) over the transient or superficial. The ubiquitous, almost-all knowing algorithm resolves into another mask for the more-or-less stable divine presence. By thus seeking the “litany” in html, and reading patriarchal authority (“dad drills”) as an exercise in “permutation,” Salameh’s poetics offers a hopeful way out of the panopticon. Poetry, specifically a lyric core, becomes the means by which her speakers, who read as female, preserve, in the domestic sphere, linked values of authenticity, opacity, and subjectivity in opposition to the technical idioms of authority. 

Hasib Hourani: execute:resistance     

The sections of Hourani’s Rock Flight are figured as a series of rocks to be thrown at the colonizer. This overwhelming political purpose unifies the collection’s scrapbook quality: it moves between diaristic vignettes (residency; office job; travel to Palestine), footnoted critiques of the occupation’s human, economic, and environmental effects, and, most strikingly, procedural how-to poems with titles like “How to Make a Rock.”⁵ This is that poem in its entirety:

Analogously to the way Wilson controls the reader’s movement in the poem with boxes and arrows, Hourani’s text works by asking the reader to enter into, and complete, a procedural structure of authority; here too is a primer. One of the first questions we might ask of such a piece is whether it resembles that category of texts we understand as poems. In this case, Hourani seems to be saying that the poem that matters is not a linguistic artifact to be read aesthetically, but the political event that occurs when the reader assents, and assumes a newly political relationship to the page—by tearing it out and balling it up. Image, music, numinosity are rejected in favor of the elemental, rendered in flat prose declaratives that accumulate over the course of the book until they overwhelm. 

The collection is so concerned with the hard simplicity of the rock and the politics of bare life that follows from it, because it understands these as a remedy to its paralyzed, mediated condition (internet, grant travel, white collar work). As Hourani writes: “i am at the center of something and yes, i can break through the plastic barrier of the thing i’m in but then i will just be trapped again, this time in something bigger, and this process will go on and on like a perfectly looped video: i am in a fleshy circle; i shed the fleshy circle; i notice a papery film closing in on me; i am being shellpacked again.” The complicit agent is the corporation hp: “hp / provides / maintains / controls / ١* the identification system in israel / ٢* the control mechanism at checkpoints / ٣* administration for their navy’s IT infrastructure / ٤* digital storage systems for their illegal settlements” (13). This, then, is why the how-to poems matter: under the sign of sabotage, by converting paper into rocks, slings, and throats, they scramble the stable lexical system on which the state, with its automated surveillance system, depends. Hourani, in effect, returns to a simple human algorithm, the how-to, which we can assent to or not, as a weapon against the mystified security algorithm imposed on us from above.        

Edward Salem: while (scrolling)

Salem, who is also Palestinian, uses the same form when he instructs the reader in Monk Fruit to “Take off your pants …/ Open Instagram, close Instagram…” then evaluate the “odds you would’ve seen / slain Palestinians with your pants down.” At the end of this exercise in being terminally online, the reader is told to “Just do something. / Assassinate Biden / ’s corpse.” As with Hourani’s instructions, the dynamic is something like: I, the author, will tell you, the reader, what to do, just as Israel tells the Palestinians what to do, so that you might understand how it feels to be a Palestinian. In both cases, the boundary between the poem and political existence is collapsed, and poetic complexity is replaced by blunt force. When Salem scrambles the algorithm by writing “9en0cide” for “genocide,” as he does throughout, we are reminded that in an era when print texts are read by machine, subjecting their authors, in Palestine, to an increased risk of assassination, poetry offers not a refuge, but a risk factor.  

If Hourani’s book, written before October 7, smolders with the utopian possibility of protest, Salem’s 2025 volume registers weariness. Its minimalist work is the adjustment of attention, and therefore self-preservation: an attempt to let the absent, mediated horror (Gaza) suffuse the present and the local without overwhelming it. Like Salameh, Salem turns monkishly toward the divine (his speakers present themselves variously as Jain, Buddhist, Muslim) in an attempt to filter the proliferation of technological maya, and to make sense of the impersonality the algorithm produces. The price is a lonely acceptance of digital isolation; one speaker jokes that death means “Everyone got their own Dome of the Rock.” 

Of these collections, Salem’s is most committed to representing the flatness and anti-epiphany of the doomscroll. One poem is composed entirely of internet cliches about the Gaza genocide, with lines such as “Refaat Alareer’s Kite. Targeting journalists. Strawberries.” Immersed in the flow of horrific memes, and assuming that his readers are too, Salem’s refusal to annotate or comment on the list is a pointed gesture. He offers not commentary, not meaning, but pure simultaneity. This is what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling”: by knowing that he doesn’t know precisely what’s going on, the poet registers the contradictions of history all the more keenly. However, even when the poem becomes a kind of reshare, by asserting itself as a poem, Salem’s work suggests that we might recognize even this destitute way of being online as a shared endeavor, and thus a ground for new relationships, new politics. 

In contemporary verse more generally, poetic language is being pressured by online diction and attention spans. Tone and register become flatter, and syntactic units such as sentence fragments, aphorisms, flashes of narrative, become shorter. At the same time, conceptual and formal levels are asked to do more work, as the complex innovations of these collections attest. In Hourani, blunt simplicity serves as a frontal assault on the web of state violence, mediation, and corporate surveillance; in Wilson, the entanglement of simple language in apparently rational relationships is a way of intervening at the level of logic itself. While still acknowledging the primacy of machine logic, Salameh and Salem fence out a role, however circumscribed, for lyric poetry as a means of making sense of mediated existence (transcendence is off the table). For all, contemporary consciousness is represented as a motile and contextual function, one that understands itself through absent communities, codeswitches tactically, and recognizes both the large risks and tentative hopes produced by its enmeshment with the algorithm.

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1. Isabella Hamad’s Recognizing the Stranger (Grove, 2024) argues that the recognition that the Palestinian is human, has become a recurrent trope of white liberalism and its literature. Mohammed el-Kurd explores the violence that Palestinians have to do to themselves to be recognized as human in Perfect Victims (Haymarket, 2025). ↩︎
2. The algorithm behind Israel’s Project Lavender uses this data to recommend air strikes without human oversight. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/gaza-un-experts-deplore-use-purported-ai-commit-domicide-gaza-call ↩︎
3. As in Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, where poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and the poet is “a man speaking to men.” ↩︎
4. In programming, “casting” is the process by which an object is categorized, so that its variables may be subsequently recognized and manipulated. ↩︎
5. Others include “How to Hold Your Breath” (which asks the reader to enter the experience of asphyxiation) and “How to Make Your Own Explosion.” ↩︎