You’ve read Rupi Kaur and Nayyirah Waheed, but have you ever read a poem written in programming language? Source code poetry is an intriguing form of poetry that Bengalurean and entrepreneur Nida Sahar seems to have mastered. Nida is on a high after winning an international source code poetry competition.
Conceived in Europe, the event has been taking place for the past five years and has a set of rules to be followed. “I did submit a piece year before last but didn’t win.
This year, I ended up winning the second place. Code Poetry is a modern form of literature that mixes human languages and machine understandable languages. Poems are written in a programming language, but it’s human readable as poetry; computer code expressed poetically, that is, playful with sound, terseness, or beauty. Apart from machine syntax, the human language syntax also needs to be kept in mind. In most situations, the code needs to compile,” shares Nida.
Nida’s piece was written in Java and she used the code style checks and the coding patterns. “The theme is based on lost communication, possibly breakup. There is transition from stammer — dots and dashes to finally reading morse code as a resolution, and eventually, this has jumbled phases from Alexander Pope’s poem Eloisa to Abelard as a remedy. It’s almost a sonnet format (14 lines with resolution in the end) but it’s more contemporary. I thought it would be interesting to use the morse code. I also wanted to play around the lines from Eloisa to Abelard. Dots and dashes seemed apt for broken communication but in morse code, they are the fundamentals of communication itself, so that would be an interesting play. It’s only after writing did I realise it turned out to be a 14 line poem, though more contemporary in nature, but like a sonnet,” Nida explains.
So, what’s next for this BMS College of Engineering alumnus? “My next step is to work on code poetry anthology, but I’m trying to figure out the nitty-gritty,” says the former Baldwinian, who is currently working on a start-up.
