Any Means Necessary to Refuse Erasure by Algorithm: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Travesty Generator

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's 2019 book of poetry is titled Travesty Generator in reference to Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke's Pascal program to fabricate pseudo-text by producing text such that each n-length string of characters in the output occurs at the same frequency as in the source text. Whereas for Kenner and O'Rourke, labeling their work a travesty is a hyperbolic tease or a literary burlesque, for Bertram, the travesty is the political reality of racism in America. For each of the works Travesty Generator, Bertram uses the generators of computer poetry to critique, resist, and replace narratives of oppression and to make explicit and specific what is elsewhere algorithmically insidious and ambivalent. In Counternarratives, Bertram presents sentences, fragments, and ellipses that begin ambiguously but gradually resolve point clearly to the moment of Trayvon Martin's killing. The poem that opens the book, threeₗastwords, is at a functional level a near-echo of the program in Nick Montfort's I AM THAT I AM, which is itself a version or adaptation of Brion Gysin's permutation poem of the same title. But Bertram’s poem has one important functional difference in that Bertram's version retains and concatenates the entire working result. With this modification, the memory required to produce all permutations of the phrase, I can’t breathe, is sufficiently greater than the storage available most computers, so the poem will end in a crashed runtime or a frozen computer--metaphorically reenacting and memorializing Eric Garner’s death. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's Travesty Generator is a challenging, haunting, and important achievement of computational literature, and in this essay, I expand my reading of this book to dig more broadly and deeply into how specific poems work to better appreciate the collection's contribution to the field of digital poetry.