Poetry in the margins

Roses are red, violets are blue, the page you requested returned 404.

My first encounter with the poetic web was Laurel Schwulst's My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?. After reading it, I began to see the web as more than a collection of files and started questioning what it means to use technology as a medium for expression. In recent years, with the release of Everest Pipkin's soft corruptor and the HTML Review, this has only strengthened my belief that poetics and technology, when combined, can generate new schools of thought and expand what is possible in our minds.

My favorite place to approach this work is through the 404 page. Websites are places to browse and wonder, but there are times when you stray from the path. The title of a link might catch your eye only to reveal a blank page, a faithfully visited URL in your browser opens to a desert, or a link sent from a loved one fails to load their note. Dead links are the nature of the game on the web, so what can we offer when this happens? Is there a moment of delight to be found in this unexpected encounter?

On my own website, this manifests as a poem made up of poetic web resources and articles, each a link to learn more about the movement. For work at Anthropic, I pushed this idea further, wanting to highlight the linguistic capabilities of LLMs. Since our models are named after poem types, it made sense to use each to write a namesake poem about 404 pages and being lost in digital spaces.

For OLI, I wanted to revisit and refine this concept. Our 404 page introduces real-time text generation. Similar to the homepage, you can ask the website for another poem and cycle through different variations. The web is a boundless medium for poetic exploration. In the future, I hope to return to this surface over and over again and build a family of poetic experiences.

Further reading

by Kening Zhu
by Sophie Koonin
by Garry Ing

In the vast digital wilderness you've found yourself wandering,

Where broken links scatter like fallen leaves,

And the page you sought has vanished into the ether,

Like a whisper carried away by cyber winds.

 

But fear not, fellow traveler of the web,

For every path that leads nowhere

Still teaches us something about the journey,

And getting lost often leads to discoveries.

 

The compass spins in this pixelated forest,

Where 404s bloom like strange flowers,

Each one a small reminder that

Even the internet has its mysteries.

 

So take a moment here in this digital clearing,

Let this unexpected stop become a brief respite,

Before you navigate back to familiar ground,

With new stories to tell of the paths less traveled.