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V. Poetry
I received the following note from a poetry teacher as this book was zooming toward publication:
What the heck is a Perl poem? I’ve been writing and teaching poetry since 1961, and I never heard of the term. I’d like to know so as to see if my students and I can write perl(s).
My response:
Conventional poems are passive: they can’t do anything other than sit on a page and wait for people to read them. Perl poems, on the other hand, are functional: they are active programs that a computer can execute. What the poem/program does is limited only by the poet’s imagination.
The most flexible computer language naturally lends itself to this most flexible linguistic endeavor. Perl poetry has been around since 1990; the original Perl poet, Sharon Hopkins, has had her work published in the Economist and Guardian.
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