Yet More Alice

Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland continues to serve as an excellent source material for Poesytron.

Closer moved, washing

Mabel with Dinah, house snot

within-- different

One opening boy

sent laid along, caused kindly

Quick feelings, fat knock

win wags larger fat

stupidly advisable

buttercup showing

Where the Sidewalk Ends Haiku

Here are some more haiku drawn from Shel Silverstein's poem "Where the Sidewalk Ends."

They-- the there wind blows,

slow pace the winds, winds-- And with

the walk place measured.

The rests bends, rests walks

asphalt pits. The sidewalk and

children where we walk.

Mostly, though, selecting based on word frequency gives me a lot of 'and', 'to', and 'for' in the haiku.  Especially 'and':

and And flowers where

Let sidewalk is sidewalk And

For peppermint to

chalk-white place And and

there the To slow the And grows

soft The us For the

I was hoping that incorporating word frequency would give me something slightly better than just including random words, by somehow sticking a little bit "truer" to the text, but it clearly comes with its own set of drawbacks.

Poesytron Celebrates St. Patrick's Day

In the spirit of green and orange, I selected the lyrics of the song "Rocky Road to Dublin" as a read-through text.  Here's the song:

And here are the Irish-themed haiku:

smother, got dogs stroll

"Would Liverpool stand, joined off,"

Galway mother says

Brogues mind thought could tired,

mother pint, at said rocky,

Connacht safely down

Got stick rigs, funny,

goblin loud as merry there,

daylight shellaillagh.

Bubblin' round month jigs,

keep failing morning 'til do,

whack-fol-la-de-da!

Alice in Wonderland Haiku II

Here are some more random-word haiku drawn from the source text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll:

Squeaking, write pattern.

Begun tails planning, pulled so.

Taller chorus near

Sighed, ornamented,

crown shutting shriek, tongue pleased, its

brush trembling, your won.

Brave, contemptuous.

Pencils, evening pleased squeezed hell.

Furiously scale.

Alice in Wonderland Haiku

I chose Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll specifically as the first text for Poesytron to "read-through." Because there are so many nonsensical elements in the novel, and Poesytron often produces nonsense, it seemed like a perfect fit.  Also, Alice is in the public domain, so the text is available for free on Project Gutenberg.

Raised difficulty--

butter leaves presents fighting.

Music wouldn’t save.

Footmen followed, used
longway, wondered aloud. Learn

ancient, belong rapped.

Nose minded driest.

Breath velvet leaning ledge state.

Impatiently leave.

Poems through Poems

With computer poetry, the output is always constrained by the input.  The haiku written by Poesytron is limited by the material I've given it to work with.  First, I gave it almost complete free rein: words were selected entirely at random from the Moby hyphenation lexicon.  Then I constrained it to words from a sample of 500 haiku, with some rules on selecting words based on them appearing in the same haiku together.

I have ideas for expanding the sample, and also creating better rules for word selection.  But before I get into those, I want to explore some other ways of applying constraints--by drawing inputs from a particular text.

For example, I can tell Poesytron to create a random-word haiku, but only using words found in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:

Tea-time rate removed

Tis putting side sign shyly

lives ever sand tongue

But I could also put constraints on word choice based on how frequently a word appears in a text.  This is easiest to do with something much shorter than a novel; say, Shel Silverstein's poem "Where the Sidewalk Ends":

sidewalk asphalt wind.

Cool grows with grass-- go There slow,

where in, and sun, the

The difference is subtle, but present.

Experimental poets often play with different constraints like these.  I've mentioned Jackson Mac Low, a poet who played with "non-intentional" methods, before, but he had one specific method that drew on other texts in a similar way.  He called it a "diastic" method, and he would read through a source text and replace each single word with several words from another text (the seed text), selecting words in order that had matching letters in certain places.

There's also a group of poets who create "potential literature" through many different methods of constraint.  They're called OuLiPo, and it's mainly a French-speaking group of writers and mathematicians.  (Their website is here; it's in French but Google can translate it, for however much that is worth.)  One of their many methods is called Chimera, and it involves taking one text, replacing all of the nouns with nouns from a second text, all of the verbs with verbs from a third text, and all of the adjectives with adjectives from a fourth text.

I'm intrigued by all of these different methods to "read through" something.  It reminds me of the statistical technique of resampling, which allows a scientist to get a much better understanding of her data by selecting and rearranging the original dataset.  I think these methods of resampling a book or poem--of rearranging, reselecting, and restructuring--can not only create new poems, but can possibly even present new ways of looking at the original text.

Reader Submissions: Quick Smolder Tango

Last week, I issued a challenge:

Send me your illustrations of your favorite Poesytron haiku!  (Or in adaptation made in any media, really.)  Even if it's a sketch made in three minutes in MS Paint, it is still going to far surpass whatever I could do, so I want to see it.

FireHair aka Jared took my instructions quite literally, and constructed this masterpiece in Paint:

quick smolder tango
satin as shapes passing a
from away, paint waves

Spectacular!  Now that's what I call smoldering!


Now don't you have something to send to me?