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.)

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.