horny robot poems

As you read this, a robot-human consortium is hard at work composing a verse epic on the Internet. “The World’s Longest Poem” is hosted on Benrik, a Web site run by British authors Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag, and is being written via a truly democratic process: anyone with access to the Internet can add a line of up to 60 characters. Lines range from the self-consciously literary to the merely self-conscious (“I think this poem has long lost its original purpose”) to spam ads, which get repeated so often that they form a sort of refrain (“cheap viagra online / cialis online / The blind Shakespearean and Yeatsian worshipper cries! / generic viagra online”). It’s currently 19,000 lines long, and growing at a rate of roughly 3,800 lines each year.

“The World’s Longest Poem” isn’t the longest poem in the world. It’s not even the longest poem on the Internet; that title belongs to a much better-organized effort called Choka On It. But it may be the poem with the lowest-ever barriers to entry, and that makes it a sort of literary rendering of our collective unconscious, the id of the Internet captured in snippets of 60 characters or less.

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