Systems to mechanize poetry writing date back at least to the 17th century. In 1677, John Peter published a booklet with the title “Artificial Versifying, or the Schoolboy’s Recreation: A new way to make Latin verses”. The booklet contained a set of tables that anyone who knows only the ABCs and can count to nine can employ to generate hundreds of true Latin verses. In the 19th century, John Clark invented a clockwork machine that could generate over 28 million lines of Latin verse. In the 20th century, playing with the generative power of language was a preoccupation of “Ouvroir de Littérature Potentialle” (Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo. One of its members, Raymond Queneau, constructed a book, One Hundred Million Million Poems, with lines of sonnets on strips of paper that could be combined in many different ways. With the advent of the digital computer, computer scientists wrote code to automate text generation. Automated poetry writing continues with new poetic practices that mine the internet for inspiration and engage readers as players of multiple games with language, art and technology.