Winter Remembering

Leaving a candle,

only winter remembering

in night shadow eyes.

This is the first of Poesytron's poems to literally give me chills.  I post a lot of nonsense here, and that's even after sorting out the really bad output that makes absolutely no sense, no matter how hard I try.  (In case you're wondering, of all the output that I go through, I consider slightly less than half of it worthy of posting.)

But the question I've been asking all along is, if I give a computer some poems, and some simple rules for selecting words out of those poems, can it create meaning?  And if it can, can it create unique meaning--and say something new with the words it rearranges?

And this haiku gives me a resounding YES to that question.  One haiku in the input database Poesytron draws on uses both "candle" and "winter," and another haiku entirely uses "winter" and "remembering."  There is not a single haiku that uses both "candle" and "remembering"--and yet those two ideas work well thematically, linked by a common thread.  And the same can be said for any three words in this haiku.

This doesn't always happen.  I've talked before of Poesytron getting stuck on one haiku in the database, and if that were the case here, I wouldn't be so excited about this result.

Sure, there's some luck involved.  This haiku somehow came together syntactically as well as thematically.  Most of Poesytron's haiku have at least one "a," "of," or "the," stuck in just the right spot to break the syntax and jar the reader out of any potential flow to the poem.  But my goal isn't to give Poesytron an exhaustive list of rules and parameters to try and make it as complexly human as possible.  To paraphrase the great economist E.F. Schumacher, "Any fool can make something complex, but it takes a touch of genius to move in the opposite direction."  My goal is to find out how few rules you need before you generate something more or less "human"--and then, of course, to explore what that means for us as readers as we encounter poems like the one above.  What happens to the obvious "meaning" of the poem when we know Poesytron had no intention behind it?

I don't even begin to have an answer for that yet.  All I know is I find a poignancy in this haiku, and that isn't something that even I expected Poesytron to be able to achieve yet.