Haiku for April 20th: April Nonsense

On Monday, I posted some haiku with the word "rain" in them.  Out of 125 haiku, nine had the word "rain"; these are the ones that made the most nonsense to me:

Realize and west,

and rain going to say to

beanfield, log beanfield.

Prince lying not smooth.

Her midwinter in the with

rain after a ice.

Wear divorce court, she--

mosquito's cow mosquito's,

cow the once rain, the

On Monday we had the great line, "Heat-- bodies, eyes, head, taste on--". With common words, Poesytron has a lot to work with when putting together a line.  But with uncommon words, such as, say, "mosquito's," there isn't much to work with--which is why we end up with "mosquito's cow mosquito's cow."  This is why I'd like to expand the input haiku--instead of just 500 haiku, I'd like to eventually have a database of thousands.

Haiku for April 18th: April Showers

I added a few lines of code to Poesytron so that it can create hundreds or even thousands of haiku at once.

Unfortunately, there's some glitch that I can't quite figure out, and after three tries (of trying to get 1,000 haiku), I only had 125.  I wish I had a clue about what's causing it to have errors!

Out of this batch of 125 haiku, nine had the word "rain" in them.  These three made the most sense to me:

or rain, migrating

the sound. Only whiten of

skeletons go with

April showers bring skeletons?

bay into, a-- comes,

full trampled the rain take the--

without dusk garden

April showers bring flowers.  Yes, right on, Poesytron!

Pollen rising inch.

Heat-- bodies, eyes, head, taste on--

lawn, rained it and she--

And flowers bring pollen, and pollen brings... well.  That's rather steamy.

Actually, that second line is probably one of Poesytron's most successful to date.  There is no haiku in the input that has all the words "bodies, eyes, head, taste", but since each successive pair is found together at some point in all the haiku, Poesytron pairs them together.  Even such simple rules for word selection can sometimes work.

The Jivin' Ladybug

I wrote a short essay on Poesytron 575 for the Jivin' Ladybug, an online journal for poetry, poets, and other linguistic-artistic delights.  You should check it out--if not to hear me ramble about the program and its implications, then to read the several never-before-seen haiku of Poesytron's that are in the essay.

I highly recommend browsing through the poetry on the Jivin' Ladybug. I particularly like Pat Lawrence's For a Frog, which is an entirely different angle on haiku, meaning, and--of course--frogs.  And for another computer/poetry mashup, Urayoán Noel read a sonnet by  Rubén Darío (in its original Spanish) into an English-language voice recognition software.

Headline Haiku

The other day, I came across an interesting project by the artist G.C. Haymes.  Begun as an exercise to overcome writer's block, the artist has created several haiku since 1987 using source text from newspapers or magazines.

"I page through a single issue of a newspaper or magazine and cutout whatever words initially catch my attention. The words are then arranged and re-arranged into the traditional three-line haiku form."

They can all be viewed at the artist's website, but here are a few of my favorites:

 Syracuse New Times, August 29, 1990:

the SPIRIT of Art

a taste of IDENTITY

SAND in the MACHINE

Village Voice, December 18, 1990:

Hail THE PERFECT fool

WHO Swallowed HIS BITTER TEARS

 AND ate HIS NAKED SOUL

Tarrant County Greensheet, April 10, 2003:

 In the Heart of Home

the PERFECT Dream is Hidden

Remodel Your World

Popsicle Box

I know I've said this before, but sometimes the poems that Poesytron produces are amazingly absurd:

Popsicle box. The

snapshots, view fog. With cat,

of a first, just that stream.

And sometimes they seem to be strangely profound:

something: the pixel--

anonymous I in old,

above stream, stepping

Haiku for April 4th: Shed darkens cow

Just one haiku today, but I think it's a pretty good one:

forced day, unswept leaves,

soft heart, a shed darkens cow,

after the wrinkled--

Haiku for April 1st: Clean Stones

Unfortunately Poesytron doesn't have any new tricks up its (his? her?) sleeve for April Fool's Day.  But here are a couple of haiku:

tadpole wriggles stone

warmth stones clean mirroring no

on old softly shift

minnows stones clean first

roar first spring on drifting forest

incoming on of

Poesytron was clearly pulling from the same haiku when it created these two, so I looked back into the haiku database it uses, and found this one, written by Christopher Herold:

new pond--

the first tadpole 

wriggles over clean stones

***

Sorry for the two-week hiatus from posting.  I'm going to switch to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule, and hopefully the updates will continue regularly!