Unintentional Poetry: Poetry "Found" on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

One of the inherent themes in computer generated poetry is the unexpectedness of what comes out.  The control over the composition of the poem lies not with a human "author," but partly within some controlled yet random process.

Jackson Mac Low was the poet who first grabbed onto this idea and ran with it.  He used several "diastic" methods, or methods that incorporated algorithms and some random chance.  Mac Low said that by using the methods, the poet "is neither the dictator nor (when he participates in the ensemble) the primary soloist.  He is willing to risk moments in performances that he will not perceive as beautiful.... That is a risk I am deliberately taking."

This idea of deliberate stochasticity is one that, I think, really stretches the boundaries of modern poetry.  It transforms what the poet is able to say within a poem, and transforms the intention of communication within a poem.

When I come across other poetry projects that also push at this boundary, I'm going to share them.  Poesytron 575 is not the only program out there that can do these things--and using a computer program is not the only way to incorporate these concepts into the composition of poetry, either.

One site that I'm very happy to see get started is Internet Poetry.  The mission of the site is to share "poetry* being spread with guerrilla tactics on the internet."  I imagine most of what they post is not going to be poetry that was intentionally written and spread, but rather poetry that is found within the structure of the internet, picked up by a discerning, poetic eye.  This is chance, controlled by the ability to pick out what is poetry (loosely defined) among the textual clutter of the internet.  And I'm very excited to see what beautiful, poignant, stark meaning might emerge.

*loosely defined


Interestingly, there is a very long tradition of haiku embedded within prose.  Matsuo Bashō, one of the first (if not the first) masters of haiku in 17th century Japan, also wrote haibun, which combines prose and haiku.  Jack Kerouac once wrote in a letter, "There are a million haikus in one good prose work," and this has led at least one scholar to look for embedded haiku within Kerouac's own prose.  The logical extension of this idea in the technological age is to look for unintentional haiku posted to Twitter.