Monday, February 28, 2011

There are a Lot of Frogs in Haiku

I had to spend an entire weekend to fix the repeating-word issue, along with some other issues in the code.

But at long last it worked!  The first non-random haiku my computer wrote was this:

ah of surf surface
frogs at sits each bends on comes
minnows of wheel the

What struck me first was how little sense this made.  The syntax is all out of order.  But a lot of poets mess with syntax--English really has fewer hard-and-fast syntax rules than we'd like to believe.  The difference is that they provide punctuation and spacing to give structure in place of syntax.  (Poesytron does not yet know anything about either punctuation and spacing.)

So I made an edited version of this haiku:


ah! of surf surface
frogs at sits— each bends, on, comes
minnows of wheel—    
    the 


And I don't know about you, but that seems to make it easier for my mind to make some meaning out of it.

1 comment:

  1. Your editing raises interesting issues around typography & meaning-making...
    TY
    POG
    RAP

    HY AN

    DMEAN

    ING MA

    KING!

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