Monday, May 9, 2011

Poetry generators

Blogger edde addad had an undergraduate major in creative writing -- and later earned a PhD in computer science.  He has written about and created poetry-generating programs. addad is one of the contributors to the blog Gnoetry Daily -- which offers ongoing discussion and examples of collaborative human-computer poetry generation.  Here is  "Mystery" -- a poem generated by eGnoetry (assisted by addad!):

     Mystery     by edde addad

     So
     you
     go near a low trembling voice outside!
     There
     is the wretched Hatter, getting entangled among the
     verses. Idiot! Who lives a holiday? Man,
     and the hookah,
     Why, it’s very slowly opened the glass
     box — Mystery.
     Don’t talk about lessons?
     Yes. It’s a conversation of
     nothing good, to think you’ll understand English. Explain.

addad's comparison of several interactive poetry generators is found here

Some readers become impatient with poetry generated using computers -- or using mathematics, as with frequent work by the OULIPO (See, for example, 2010 postings for November 17, August 23 and March 25. )  On the other hand, if we wish to express new ideas, ones not limited by our own predispositions and experiences, such techniques offer opportunities -- they give us ways to excape the limitations of ourselves.

This blog's posting on Feb 6, 2011 offered a link to another poetry generator -- Sea and Spar Between -- developed by Stephanie Strickland and  Nick Montfort and published in 2010 in Dear Navigator (a forum for innovative writing); this work combines fragments from Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville and has the potential to create 225 trillion different quatrains, each specified by a pair of coordinates between 1 and 14992383.

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