In a 1965 Vancouver lecture, Jack Spicer remarked, “I’m sure I could compose a Blake prophetic book on a computer with a very little bit of programming for the tape.” Spicer imagined a poem-machine; he did not build one. This does not mean that computer poetry was unavailable by 1965. Earlier experiments such as Christopher Strachey’s Love Letters, along with early-1960s works such as R. M. Worthy’s Auto-Beatnik and Nanni Balestrini’s Tape Mark I, had already shown that computers could generate literary or pseudo-literary language. Yet these works clarify the distance between computational novelty and poetic ambition. A template-based love letter, a Beat-style sentence generator, or a recombinatory tape poem is one kind of machine; a Blakean prophetic book is another. Spicer’s remark matters because it imagines not simply automatic text, but a procedural system large enough to sustain myth, seriality, recurrence, transformation, and form.

This seminar begins from that difference. Procedural poetry has often been discussed through its precedents: combinatory forms, acrostics, divination, collage, cut-up, Surrealist games, Oulipian constraint, serial composition, performance scores, concrete and visual poetry, computer poetry, hypertext, bots, codework, and other rule-based practices. We begin from those histories, but turn toward a present-tense question: what should procedural poetry do now that the tools for building literary procedures are available to writers and scholars without formal training in programming?

The question is both technical and literary. AI-assisted coding tools do not simply generate texts; they allow poets, teachers, translators, critics, and students to construct machines, constraints, interfaces, archives, and compositional systems. This shift asks us to reconsider authorship, intention, collaboration, accident, craft, access, and control. It also asks whether procedural poetry can become a broader creative-critical practice: one in which the non-programmer is no longer excluded from procedural making, and code becomes a site of literary thinking rather than a gatekeeping threshold.

We welcome papers that consider procedure as compositional method, historical form, comparative problem, pedagogical practice, or digital-humanities tool. What counts as a procedure? Who designs it, who executes it, and who is allowed to revise it? How do procedural forms change when they move from page to screen, archive to interface, code to classroom, or expert programming to tool-assisted making? What goals should procedural poetry set for itself now: estrangement, access, critique, play, translation, demystification, collaboration, or new forms of attention?

The seminar invites scholars, poets, translators, digital humanists, and graduate students working across periods, languages, and media. Its aim is to place the long history of procedural writing in conversation with the immediate question of what we can build, teach, and imagine now.