Program RETURNER
Louis T. Milic
the first standalone edition of milic’s returner poems.
This booklet imagines how a sequel to Louis T. Milic’s Program ERATO (1971), one of the earliest published volumes of computer poetry, might have looked. While Milic developed at least four poetry generators, only ERATO’s outputs were graced with a dedicated volume. This is especially curious in that Milic’s most ambitious undertaking was not ERATO, but rather a system called RETURNER — the subject of this speculative edition.
Aleator Press has taken special care to make this booklet look and feel like a sequel to Program ERATO: the original edition that was published by The Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1971, but also our own facsimile edition of 2020 (Regenerators Series No. 1). Milic created the RETURNER program to synthesize stanzas similar in form to those of Alberta T. Turner’s poem “Return” (1968). Fascinatingly, RETURNER enchanted Turner to such a degree that she was compelled to create new poems that were inspired by its generated outputs. In her words, she “re-turned” the RETURNER content. This booklet contains one hundred stanzas produced by RETURNER, along with “Return” and two of Turner’s post-computational explorations, “Hoeing Song” and “Season.” It also features a foreword by Milic and an afterword by Turner — these were distilled from their original writings on these projects. This edition has been approved by the Louis T. Milic estate, and Alberta T. Turner’s poems are reprinted here with the permission of her estate.
This speculative booklet appears in an edition of 216 copies, which corresponds to the number of possible outcomes of a roll of three dice. Each copy is hand-stamped with one of these unique dice rolls, and as such, the booklets are enumerated using a bijective senary notation.
Program RETURNER is the second offering in our Regenerators series, which comprises reprints of scarce early volumes of computer-generated literature, as well as speculative editions that imagine artful publications in this area that could have appeared, but never did — until now.
Louis T. Milic (1922–2003) was a scholar and practitioner who made pioneering contributions to the digital humanities over an academic career spanning decades. Born in Yugoslavia, he spent his teenaged years in New York and earned his PhD at Columbia in 1963. Milic also taught there, at Teachers College, from 1955–69. From 1969–78, he chaired the English department at Cleveland State University (CSU) and served on its faculty until his retirement in 1991. He is best known for his computer-mediated work in stylistic analysis, which began with his PhD thesis, one of the first in what is now called the digital humanities.
