thinking about the work that I do in relation to "procedural content generation" and wondering (honestly): is poetry "content"?

for the poetry that I try to make and the poetry that I like, I feel like the answer to this is "no"—I try to make poems that are themselves the inevitable and unique product of the procedure that makes them. so they're not content as much as they are an artifact of/window into the procedure.

(note that this isn't an attempt to position poetry as more interesting or more important than other kinds of literature, or my own obsessions as manifestly virtuous. I'm just trying to understand why writing programs that generate poetry feels different from writing programs that generate, e.g., narrative)

this is all partially in response to this tweet https://twitter.com/v21/status/865647063605813249 the idea of "a term that flattens the difference between mediums," but also how "content" is a word for something that fills a vessel, serves a purpose, animates something... to me though writing poetry has always been about breaking vessels and inventing new vessels. language is only poetry to the extent that it does nothing other than address its own effects