Serendipitous Poetry from the New York Times

Yesterday Times Haiku launched on tumblr, posting finds from a computer algorithm written to find unintentional haiku in the New York Times.  Like other "found" poetry algorithms I've posted about before, it starts with a simple premise of scanning sentences for syllable counts.  (Poesytron also starts with syllable counts, and in its simplest form, ends there.)  But the creator, Jacob Harris, Senior Software Architect and self-described "news hacker" for the Times, has added a few bells and whistles to the program that give the end result real beauty and elegance.

First is the added visual element that's incorporated.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I present Poesytron's haiku visually, and have opted to make decisions on punctuation, syntax, and layout myself (given that these are very difficult things to make a computer program do).  Harris has instead opted to present every haiku in a left-justified, five-seven-five layout, but has added a visual element that can be determined by a program:

"On every image, you’ll notice a seemingly random background pattern of colored lines. The different orientations of those lines are computer-generated according to the meter of the first line of the poem."

Second is linking each haiku back to the Times article it came from.  Found poetry has, by its very nature, an  incredibly ephemeral quality to it: the act of discovering unintentional poems is happenstance, serendipitous, and dependent on where you happen to be looking at that very moment.  Assigning a computer program to do the looking for you (as opposed to finding haiku in newspapers with a human eye) does not erase those qualities from found poetry.  The Times Haiku algorithm checks the New York Times homepage for newly published articles several times a day.  So the haiku you see on the front page of the tumblr are inextricably linked to what's in the news in the past few days, and gradually an archive of daily-news ephemera will build up on the site.  And yet, the links make it possible to instantly put the haiku back into their original context, which is not something I've seen with found poetry before.

I'm definitely looking forward to watching the Times Haiku project unfold.

July

July's a little late in the year for cherry blossoms, but I still like what Poesytron did with this one:

Beaches, abalone.

Lovers.  A surf.  The cherry

blossoms on July.

Belches melt

Belches melt.

Sea.

Seven songs,

full nights,

those nights.

Lilac.

This,

the tiny,

the

Belches air--sky.

Memories--the weaver's.

The mouse eve.

The cleaves dance.

Nobody

Nobody's going.

Couple. Edge. Saying goodbye.

Wind one perfuming.

Spruce tree, autumn piled

leaves. Nobody's going to

mountain reflected.

Nobody's away.

The ruins house burnt mosquitoes.

Burnt there is rising.

Smells in you pleasure

Biggest. Prettiest.

The grave smells in you pleasure,

the peach white twilight.

If "biggest prettiest" seems familiar, it should.

March

Everything spring, and

in dance, soft march a to thought.

Buddha praying day.

Wrinkles not is her,

gathers twilight, march slowly,

shift flower's, his with-

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.

Horse Grass

Highest divorce call

over the November nightfall.

Shadow lake's horse grass.

Electricity

Electricity

And all of     In single blue

Tip skinned hot tourists

Anti-Valentine

When I was picking out haiku Poesytron wrote with the word "love" in them for Valentine's Day on Tuesday, a few struck me as a little less than romantic.  So in case you weren't feeling the love this year, either, Poesytron commiserates:

Bliss loves.  Blue bell.  Some

cries, the left your memories.

Nowhere, sky.  More, bag.

Both sport love, loves you.

Foucault, you're postmodern, a

hawk of wind, brown rythm.

Tobacco pipe and

lovers shells, tiny shells on

souls unplucked as is.

Poesytron Valentines

Consider giving one of these gems to your loved one today:

Writing lady white

on a roar damp light, a sign

in boundless love red.

Shorter gotten blocks,

blizzard blocks, blizzard to a

square love, flat swift stones.

Coquettish love, a

in old of warm cigar clay,

the blossoms.  Her.  I.

Among grasses, water,

over lover of a new glove,

white smell when I... on.

Grandfather's pipe and

soprano, and both partners

love mouth, a sand wet.

Good nature's goodness.

More bag, cat, love, lipstick, words!

Poetry--blunt ice.

Bloom by a morning.

By small night, both partners sport

love single the drops.

Lovers memories.

Out memories! Hang from new

letter in looking.

Reminds poet, humble

is and one afternoon love.

Bliss.  Single grass call.

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.

Questions

Going through Poesytron's most recently generated haiku, I was struck by this one, and how it very nearly forms a narrative:

Point.  What's deaf?  What's she's?

What's inside?  Dad says, where the

first snow, a autumn.

Drawing another Way

Snow predicted. The

sand signing names, a drawing,

another Way.   Cliff's.

Wax belches, Hades dances

Wax belches! Hades dances!

The carving, the-- a misty

in Snowman after

I love the juxtaposition here of Hades and a snowman.

Star Bomb

Bill Crow, snow from white

Star Bomb makes a somewhere of

handful.      A

                               On

                                                  Takes.

As usual, all of the formatting of Poesytron's haiku was imposed by me.

Snow, my stiff onions

This week, I'll be posting some wintry haiku generated by Poesytron.

Snow, my stiff onions.

Upper-- With boy go to the

snowfalls. Power on.

What I find fascinating in this one is how 'snow' shows up in both the first and last lines.  The Poesytron code attempts to pair consecutive words that get used together, so similar words often end up near each other.  Consider, for example:

ants! she the net the--

as by the snow birthday can't--

ninetieth blow blows

Here we get "the net the" and "blow blows."  In the second case, because Poesytron's database is so small (drawing on 500 haiku written by real people), I can actually track down how the similar words became paired together.  A bit of trawling through let me find these two haiku:

90th birthday
flickering candles
he can't blow out

            - m. harper


second birthday —
he blows out all
the dandelion seeds
            - collin barber

You can tell from comparing Harper's haiku to Poesytron's above the problem that comes from having such a limited database.  (That's something I'm working on.)  Once Poesytron picked the word birthday, it selected Harper's haiku (out of all haiku with 'birthday' in them in the database--a whopping three) for the next word, and it got stuck there, choosing can't, then ninetieth, then blow from the same haiku.  Then, assuming Poesytron picked birthday again, it then couldn't use it due to the syllable count.  So it went looking for another haiku that used birthday, settled on Barber's haiku, and chose blows for the next word.

This is exactly what I want to happen--words that often get used with the same words get used together.  There are more elegant ways I'd like to code this process, of course, but for now even my crude method is working.

Anyway, back to my original point--somehow, in the first haiku I shared, Poesytron went from snow to snowfall, just as it did from blow to blows, but yet it wound its way through several other words first--stiff, onions, boy....  In this case, though, it's not because Poesytron is 'smart' or that there is some cool linguistic chain that can be drawn through snow-stiff-onions-boy-snowfall, but because there are only so many words in the database (1,815, to be exact), so the laws of probability mean that there's a pretty good chance that two words which "go" together will end up in any given haiku.  (And if you're not convinced, read this.)

Halloa from my new computer

I know that my three loyal readers have been disappointed by Poesytron 575's writer's block of recent months.

Well, that scrappy little computer code isn't dead.  I've finally transferred the files over from my dying netbook to my brand-new Lappy 486, and took her for a test drive:

paludism halloaed

staidness brit quandary fern

puckery sawyer

That's my new lappy's first random haiku, and I think it makes a pretty good introduction.

Haiku for June 13th: Handful of Trying

Handful of trying,

to the, to the hands. Fog, the

barn, the cross table.

Usually when the word "the" appears in a haiku this many times, it doesn't make a lot of sense--particularly if Poesytron gets stuck in a loop like "to the to the."  (The Poesytron haiku that I tend not to share have a lot of jumbles of prepositions and thes without any nouns.  "The and of", "my with a the", etc.)  But I thought this one somehow came together.

Haiku for June 10th: Heaven Summer Garden

Pulled over, of viewing,

well, heaven.  Summer garden.

Spinning plastic round.