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.

An Oldie But a Goodie

From Basic Instructions:

Panel 2 is essentially what I hope to accomplish with Poesytron.

Haiku Comic: September 14th

Saw this today and had to share:

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/091411/

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.

Headline Haiku

The other day, I came across an interesting project by the artist G.C. Haymes.  Begun as an exercise to overcome writer's block, the artist has created several haiku since 1987 using source text from newspapers or magazines.

"I page through a single issue of a newspaper or magazine and cutout whatever words initially catch my attention. The words are then arranged and re-arranged into the traditional three-line haiku form."

They can all be viewed at the artist's website, but here are a few of my favorites:

 Syracuse New Times, August 29, 1990:

the SPIRIT of Art

a taste of IDENTITY

SAND in the MACHINE

Village Voice, December 18, 1990:

Hail THE PERFECT fool

WHO Swallowed HIS BITTER TEARS

 AND ate HIS NAKED SOUL

Tarrant County Greensheet, April 10, 2003:

 In the Heart of Home

the PERFECT Dream is Hidden

Remodel Your World

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.