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.

Storms Dribbling

When I first read this haiku:

rocky jewel the

song established the from skies

clearing storms dribbling

my brain completely skipped over the "the" in between "established" and "from."  What clear sentence structure, I thought, as my mind pieced it together as:

Rocky jewel.

The song established from skies clearing,

storms dribbling.

But, alas, Poesytron doesn't know grammar or syntax (and the way it's currently coded, it favors common one-syllable words like "the"), so the actual haiku is pretty nonsensical.

Haiku for May 23rd: Ice Hard Sharp

Slips sun, ice hard sharp.

Blunt thoughts slices sour thoughts-- is

gone.  Ice.  The flash pines.

This is one of those where the decisions I make on formatting can really change the reading of the haiku.  Is it "Slips sun, ice-hard sharp," or rather "Slips sun-ice, hard sharp"?

Some other formatting options could be:

Slips sun ice hard, sharp

blunt thoughts. Slices sour thoughts is--

Gone ice. The flash. Pines.

Or maybe:

 

Slips. Sun ice hard. Sharp.

Blunt. Thoughts slices sour. Thoughts is

gone. Ice the flash pines.

Poesytron has no "intention" when it creates.  In formatting its haiku for you, the reader, I am another author--or a translator, maybe, an intermediary force that shapes the poem and influences the meaning ascribed by your mind.

I am sure this intermediary step could also be automated, but I am in no way ready to tackle that computing challenge.

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.

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

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.

Unintentional Poetry: Poetry "Found" on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

One of the inherent themes in computer generated poetry is the unexpectedness of what comes out.  The control over the composition of the poem lies not with a human "author," but partly within some controlled yet random process.

Jackson Mac Low was the poet who first grabbed onto this idea and ran with it.  He used several "diastic" methods, or methods that incorporated algorithms and some random chance.  Mac Low said that by using the methods, the poet "is neither the dictator nor (when he participates in the ensemble) the primary soloist.  He is willing to risk moments in performances that he will not perceive as beautiful.... That is a risk I am deliberately taking."

This idea of deliberate stochasticity is one that, I think, really stretches the boundaries of modern poetry.  It transforms what the poet is able to say within a poem, and transforms the intention of communication within a poem.

When I come across other poetry projects that also push at this boundary, I'm going to share them.  Poesytron 575 is not the only program out there that can do these things--and using a computer program is not the only way to incorporate these concepts into the composition of poetry, either.

One site that I'm very happy to see get started is Internet Poetry.  The mission of the site is to share "poetry* being spread with guerrilla tactics on the internet."  I imagine most of what they post is not going to be poetry that was intentionally written and spread, but rather poetry that is found within the structure of the internet, picked up by a discerning, poetic eye.  This is chance, controlled by the ability to pick out what is poetry (loosely defined) among the textual clutter of the internet.  And I'm very excited to see what beautiful, poignant, stark meaning might emerge.

*loosely defined


Interestingly, there is a very long tradition of haiku embedded within prose.  Matsuo Bashō, one of the first (if not the first) masters of haiku in 17th century Japan, also wrote haibun, which combines prose and haiku.  Jack Kerouac once wrote in a letter, "There are a million haikus in one good prose work," and this has led at least one scholar to look for embedded haiku within Kerouac's own prose.  The logical extension of this idea in the technological age is to look for unintentional haiku posted to Twitter.

What is Poesytron 575?

Poesytron 575 is a simple computer code I wrote that generates haiku.

(The breakdown of its name: "poesy" means the art of writing poetry; "-tron" because it all happens in a computer; and "575" for the standard syllable count of English haiku.)

But Poesytron is a process, not a product.  I wrote the program so that I could experiment with the experience of reading haiku, and one single "finished" program is not even going to begin to satisfy all the questions I have in mind.  Some of those questions are:

Can a poem still have meaning even if the "author" is a mindless computer, acting on defined rules?

If it has meaning, does it have any value?

What is the role of the author, or the reader, in poetry?

Can a "virtual" poet invoke the same emotions in a reader as a human poet?

And this is just a starting point.

This is an ambitious project for me.  I am not (a) a poet (or at least more than an amateur one), nor (b) a computer programmer.  What I am is a scientist, so I've been trained to ask a lot of questions and not to rely too heavily on assumptions.  So I think that even if I am going outside of my field on this project, it will be a fun journey for me and I still might be able to make some interesting observations along the way.

With this blog, I want to track the evolution of Poesytron 575 and see if it ends up writing any good poetry.  ("Good," of course, is going to be very, very subjective!)  There are a few different types of posts I'm going to make:

1. The haiku that Poesytron writes.

2. The computer code that is Poesytron 575.  (I will try to include enough code so that people who know stuff about computer programming can use it themselves if they want to, but I'll also try to keep these posts fairly non-technical, so anyone can understand how exactly Poesytron does what it does.)

3. Stuff about poetry and meaning and what the point of this all is--basically, whatever I think is really, really interesting that relates to the Poesytron Project.

So that's what I'm doing and why I'm here.  Now, on to the haiku!