Poetry can be seen as way for a poet to reveal something approaching the truth, whatever that may hold or mean. There is an intentionality in each choice that gets made; a decision of this word over that, these structures over those, even this amount of white space over some other. Many explanations of the difference between poetry and prose discuss the economy or elegance of the words, those choices made to communicate as much as possible with the least.

What makes a poem a poem, outside of that intent? The answers vary by poem and poet. For this analysis of my own work, I wondered whether or not the voice I have would remain identifiable even if the lines of my poems were decontextualized. If I could find a way to randomly construct new "poems" from lines sheared from existing poems, would they still be poems? And would they still be mine? I also wanted an iterative process, one that would be able to be repeated and enable a theoretically near-infinite number of new works to be created in the browser.

In a way, poetry as a process with intent or choice resembles the construction of programs or scripts, so there are parallels between writing poetry and writing code. However, one huge strength of code is using it to get computers to do the heavy lifting of randomization. For this randomizing, I chose Perl, not only for its ability to work as a cgi script, but also because I have enough familiarity with it to read code samples and evaluate them for useability. Additionally, Perl has a reputation for being a powerful and economical language, so its parallel to poetry made it a clear choice.

Because I have only a passing knowledge of Perl, I looked for freely available scripts that were secure and that could be modified to do what wanted: display random text. I found one here.

In developing these randomizers, I wanted to get at the shape of a poem as well. In other words, stanzas, white space, and titles should be incorporated. The initial attempt, Elementary Poetry Machine, calls the cgi script first four times, then three times, with a line break in between. The cgi script looks at a text file that is over 900 lines long, which is made up of lines taken from 38 poems I have written and consider to be "completed." It chooses one of those lines at random, and passes it to the browser to be displayed. The text version of the amended cgi script is here, and the simple html for the page is here.

Because I didn't have enough time to learn how to amend the Perl script to display stanzas randomly, I also looked for freely available javascripts that could be modified to do what wanted: display random text. I found one here.

The second attempt used JavaScript to call the original cgi script, adding the returned lines into some crude one to four element arrays, which act as stanzas. Then a random number was generated four times, and the stanzas corresponding to that number are displayed in the browser. Additionally, a title was created by displaying the words "This is:" and following that with a call to the same cgi script. The text version of the amended cgi script is here.

This technique is kludgy, and the multiple calls to the cgi sometimes break the Machine and nothing displays. Sometimes whole stanzas are repeated, due to the small set size available to pick random numbers from. What is interesting, though, is that sometimes different stanzas contain the same line, allowing for a similar kind of repetition that would be found in some poetic forms like the triolet. This version has been taken off-line due to too many issues.

While the lines and stanzas have been randomized in these poems, there is still some sense of voice or style. Common elements such as repeated words (such as those visualized in the tag cloud) lend that sense, as do repeated lines. As a poet, this ability to recombine elements into novel combinations can result in noise, but it can also create, if not fully fledged poems--for, arguably, these are poems as much as their progenitors are--then seeds of future poems. Artists rely on a strange combination of the familiar, or those things we are drawn to over and over again, and the novel or unknown. These Poetry Machines have that combining power, mixing the intentional randomly into some new thing.

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All creative works, generated or otherwise, copyright © 2007-2012 - Ray Henry