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.

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.

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.