April 30, 2025
Photos by Kedrick Walker
April 19, 2025 — Brooklyn, NY — 116 people gathered at Secret Riso Club for Computer Poetry, a poetry reading organized by School for Poetic Computation Co-Director Neta Bomani. The event posed a central question: What happens when machines speak in metaphors, when lines of code carry feeling, and when poetry meets programming on its own terms?
“Code isn’t just functional—it’s expressive”, Bomani said. Poetic computation asks us to press against the systems around us, to glitch them, to speak back.
Photo of the people gathered at Secret Riso, sitting down, facing towards a small stage, where Neta Bomani is addressing the audience.The event featured readings by Jupi Bowen, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, and Allison Parrish—three poets who respond to digital culture and reimagine computational language as a space of expression, refusal, and rupture in their work.
Photo of Jupi Bowen, who is reading a poem while they sit on a stool. They are reading from an iPad.Bowen, a queer Afro-Caribbean writer, opened the evening with poems that spiraled through internet adolescence and Black queer embodiment. They delivered a blend of memory, critique, and dark wit, referencing early digital spaces like Gaia Online, Tumblr, and AIM with both nostalgia and grief. “We have to kill ChatGPT, I’m not kidding,” Bowen said. “The internet morphed into a carceral space. I’ve been grieving ever since.” Known for their Substack PAINHUB, Bowen’s work is deeply autobiographical, challenging the idea that data is neutral or that platforms are ever safe.
Close-up photo of Joseliah Rebekah Hughes reading a poem in her phone.Joselia Rebekah Hughes followed with layered, image-rich poems that drew from her latest chapbook Blackable: A Be Codex. “Reality demands the rage,” Hughes said. “Needs intelligent fiasco. The emotional woe forms a pillar.” Her lines moved between quiet intimacy and structural critique, blending the everyday with the mythic. “You ever inhaled deeply from a person who’s bleeding out? No? Nevermind,” Hughes said. Her poetry, published widely including in The Poetry Project, Split This Rock, and Massachusetts Review, holds space for what she calls “radical access” and insists on poetics as a survival strategy.
Photo of Allison Parrish holding a computer, displaying her electronic poetry.Allison Parrish, a programmer known for her work in electronic literature and computational poetics, closed the evening with selections from her forthcoming book Two of Pentacles, out April 26 from Nothing to Say Press. “The world is full of nectarine x-rays,” Parrish said. “Death becomes espresso.” Her text, partially generated by algorithms she wrote herself, bent language into surreal and surprising forms. “Where the wildbirds sing the wildbirds sing as sweetly blending… up to the summit of a hill… have the trumpets blow,” Parrish said. Her previous projects, including poetry bots and experimental language games, are widely accessible on her website decontextualize.com, where she shares tools and reflections on her practice.
“This evening reminded us that poetic computation isn’t just about code,” Bomani said. “It’s about building new languages and listening closely to the ones we already carry.”
Video montage of the Computer Poetry zine, printed in riso, in different shades of green.After the readings, the room transitioned into an informal mixer, with riso-printed chapbooks of the poets’ work circulating fresh from the print studio. People lingered for over an hour, flipping through pages, asking questions, and reflecting together. What emerged wasn’t just a literary event, but a communal moment—syntax giving way to sentiment, logic folding into lyricism.
Attendees of the event and poet Joselia Rebekah Hughes hold the riso zine while they pose for a photo outside on the street.
Photo of Secret Riso Club