Aftershave Stairs

I want to linger a bit longer on one of the haiku I posted yesterday:

Dress

     Mom to

           In our

Aftershave stairs

            Heat darkens

Lingering sun

         Low

As I've explained before, Poesytron picks each new word by randomly picking a word from a randomly picked haiku in the database that contains the previously selected word (even if it couldn't make the previously selected word fit into the count).

So when the first word is "dress," Poesytron finds a haiku out of the 500 in the database (so far), and in this case it must have chosen this haiku by Laurie MacFayden:

Mom says wear a dress

My brothers get to wear jeans

Who made this dumb rule?

And Poesytron randomly picks out "mom" for the next word, and then repeats the process.

So when it gets to "aftershave," there is only one haiku to pick from, and it is this one, by Jocelyne Verret:

Your aftershave climbs

the stairs ahead of your steps

I inhale pleasure

Now what I find really interesting here is that everything Verret has said in a dozen words can be conveyed in just the two words that Poesytron picked out: "aftershave stairs."  The people referenced may be different, but the exact same scene is being conveyed.

There's something going on here, and that something is juxtaposition.  I'm reading a book right now called Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry, and the author, Charles Hartman, talks about juxtaposition at length.  Jumping from one detail to the next without transition is one of the fundamentals of poetry--especially in haiku, where the structure doesn't permit the space to fill in the gaps.  Hartman says, "Juxtaposition makes the reader an accomplice in the poem, forging the links of meaning.  In the process we supply a lot of energy, and that involves us in the poem."

So in Poesytron's haiku above, it is really me (and you), the reader, filling in the scene around the words.  On a post a few days ago, FireHair left a comment that said, "we don't read words so much as habitual relationship between words."

When I read poems written by humans, I am not aware so much that I'm an accomplice in the poem, or that I'm reading habitual relationships between words rather than the words themselves.  But when I read Poesytron's poems, I'm conscious of the active role I have to take--even though I suspect that I'm not doing any more than when I read "real" poetry, and maybe even any text.

Of course there is a balance here, and I'm not sure exactly where the tipping point is.  Sometimes Poesytron gives me "aftershave stairs," or "quick smolder tango," but sometimes it gives me "raindrop a the his we're we."  I don't have a framework that I can fill in the gaps in that one--so it becomes nonsense to me.   But it's not that Poesytron wrote something nonsensical; it's that words "get their meaning from their relations to other words" (Hartman), and the relational structure of the words in that line, inside my brain, doesn't have enough support beams for me to stand on.

Language is a funny, funny thing.