Did a quick search for a few poets (the usual, Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Lorraine Neidecker, Robert Zukofsky), thinking about tryin

Did a quick search for a few poets (the usual, Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Lorraine Neidecker, Robert Zukofsky), thinking about trying to champion at least one of them (Neidecker, probably). Then I remembered, this is hacker news, these are programmers. Before I was a programmer, I was a poet and a poetry teacher. One of the things that started drawing me towards programming and technology were poets like bpNichol and his fantastic "First Screening". He wrote it on an Apple IIe using BASIC in 83-84 and folks have been "translating" it throughout the past 30 years to keep it accessible on newer PCs. There's a lot of poetry and hacker ethos coming together to keep this little gem alive: I recommend the .mov[1] version as the Javascript[2] version is a bit too nice (fonts, no flickering, etc), but you can also run the original code[3] in an emulator. Or, for an entirely different experience, read the source code[4]. Read all about it here: http://vispo.com/bp/introduction.htm http://vispo.com/bp/introduction.htm 1: http://vispo.com/bp/firstscreening.mov http://vispo.com/bp/firstscreening.mov 2: http://vispo.com/bp/first-screening-javascript-version/firstscreening.html http://vispo.com/bp/first-screening-javascript-version/first... 3: http://vispo.com/bp/emulatedversion.htm http://vispo.com/bp/emulatedversion.htm 4: http://vispo.com/bp/download/FirstScreeningBybpNichol.txt http://vispo.com/bp/download/FirstScreeningBybpNichol.txt