On Virtually Disembodied Expression
Poetry in the digital age is a curious subject. Writers with aesthetic, lyrical, political, and other agendas abound, despite mass culture's minimal engagement with this literary form. The popularity of MFA Creative Writing programs is remarkable (even if the quality of poetry produced is sometimes called into question), and readings and publications featuring non-academics are abundant. Small presses thrive and diversify on the Web. One of the few basic objective observations to be made about contemporary poetry is that some poets choose to write using structures established centuries ago, and many others are writing in open, or process-based, forms more recently developed. Questions as to what poetry is, and what it accomplishes, resound, and a singular definition or purpose is practically impossible to establish authoritatively.
Beyond these somewhat ambiguous circumstances, we live in an age when, as improbable as it may seem, poetry can be written by a computer programmed to do so. This is not a new possibility, either. Since the late 1950s, and throughout subsequent decades, programmers have gone to great lengths to create digitally infused verse.
The first wide-scale notice of this artistic development dates as far back as 1962, when TIME (5/22/62) published a brief article called "The Pocketa, Pocketa School," critically profiling a computer program named Auto-Beatnik. As I observe in my book Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, Auto-Beatnik's output does not reflect sensitivity, but poetic traits found in the program's output emulates free verse (particularly stream of consciousness) and resembles a strain of Beat poetry. Auto-Beatnik's poems, like those made with many (digital) poetry generating programs, are not without obvious flaws (overt, mundane repetition is among the primary villains) and its premise is formidable.
Yet since poetry, historically, was calculated using fixed metric structures and patterns, maybe we shouldn't be surprised to now see poetry being formulated by humans working with computers. From another angle, automatically randomizing texts with computer programs is also a logical next step in the Dada progression. Like so many who labored with the craft in previous eras, contemporary poets (who happen to work with computers) confront social and artistic fragmentation in the world around them, using technology to atomize and hybridize texts that subvert, reflect, and perhaps extend the complex of cultural information. Authors use fragmentation to legitimize fragmentation and challenge the stability of language as a point of meaning; this process of re-assembling disparate pieces via technology can be used as a means to impart a sense of coherence and transformation.
Although approaches to the task are varied, the foremost characteristic of automatically generated poems is permutation. A set of words is used again and again, sometimes slotted into templates. However, if programming instructions are complex, and the databases employed are large (or multiple), the obviousness of such traits can be diminished (while linguistic content of many works is limited, other select words from entire dictionaries). Virtual poetry (or writing machines) can be entirely original, interactive (readers set constraints, parameters, and add vocabulary), and/or seek to simulate a certain style of writing, or the tone of a particular writer. In fact, the inclination to incorporate words and verbal intonations used by historically known poets, giving them new context and visibility, is fascinating attribute that has persisted throughout the span of this programming practice.
The first poetry generator, Theo Lutz's "Stochastic Text" (1959), for example, utilized words and subjects chosen from Kafka's The Castle. One of the earliest experiments by an American, Emmett Williams's concretist poem "Music," incorporated the most popular words from Dante's Divine Comedy. Such efforts were not engineered to duplicate, but rather propel new circumstances for (and possibly new understandings of) the original texts. Lutz's choice to build the first computer poems based on Kafka's book is especially intriguing, and adds a layer of significance to the endeavor. It is possible that Lutz chose Kafka's incomplete novel as a foundation out of respect for poetry, as a way to question the communicative values of machine modulated verse. While the processes of generating or consuming the poetry do not particularly reflect or require the reader to embody the type of mysterious bureaucracy experienced by the protagonist of Kafka's novel, an alienated, barren tone pervades the output of the program (see http://www.stuttgarter-schule.de/lutz_schule_en.htm for documentation; see http://auer.netzliteratur.net/0_lutz/lutz_original.html and http://copernicus.netzliteratur.net/index1.html for emulators created by Johannes Auer). As in other successful works of this sort, the best examples of Lutz's generated poems are impressive because the reader, via the condensation and computer processing of the materials, can rediscover the essence of Kafka's story, or somehow experience new perspectives derived from the original text. Ideally, the selection of words, combined with a stimulating programming method, enables a speculative, self-reflexive, unconventional style of expression.
To say a poem is automatically generated does not mean an enormous amount of effort has not gone into its production; nor does it mean that it has reached its final form (i.e., critic/practitioner Charles O. Hartman sees his programs as "first draft" writers). Writing a sophisticated poetry generator is not easy work, and positive reviews of the effort are far from being guaranteed because the results often dissatisfy discerning readers. As early as 1967, critical articles written by serious practitioners of the form began to appear. Insiders, such as John Morris, (whose experiments with, and discussions about, computer haiku are certainly worth reading), challenged and even denounced the purposes of the endeavor. Pioneers in the field, such as Nanni Balestrini, never returned to the task after early investigations. Nonetheless, experimentation has continued, and the results are impressive and intriguing for various reasons.
For instance, a few years ago, Jim Carpenter (a programmer affiliated with the Wharton Business School), had an idea that he could write a program that would output publishable poems, and he has succeeded. In the "Directed Poetics" section of his generator Erika (see http://etc.wharton.upenn.edu:8080/Etc3beta/), interactive pull-down menus enable the reader/user to establish a poem's content. In addition selecting the type of stanza, the "word pool" (i.e., topic context, topic only, topic synonyms, topic antonyms, and alliteration), and subject/object preferences, the reader also prescribes "grammars" and "context sources" for the poems. These latter components purport to allow the poem to embody and grammatical structures appropriated from known foundations. Besides offering grammars labeled "Mimetic," "nominatives," "titles," "Subordinate clauses," "fragments," "hinge clause," "lyric," "nominatives," "questions," and "common," the option to incorporate grammatical styles by Sylvia Plath, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Frank O'Hara, and Gary Snyder is also offered. While I am not sure that the "voices" of these writers always emerge from the noise, the words of the two writers who are always at the core of Erika's poetry, Emily Dickinson and Joseph Conrad, are effectively repurposed by the program.
Millie Niss (with Martha Deed) has produced another generator that uses the styles of contemporary and canonical writers. Niss's "The Electronic Muse" (http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/niss__oulipoems.html), which appears in the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1 (a publication reflecting the wide variety of techniques writers have deployed using computers), creates and accumulates lines written in the manner of John Hollander ("Since broken and indivisible poverty rages, that works raging possible telephones on dense leaves"), Shakespeare ("We with speed crept around pale dispriz'd vows"), Anne Sexton ("If you urinate, then pine-paneled and well-born kisses menstruate"), Harriet Mullen ("Recyclable, we deliver with in the family way lights", Robert Browning ("Have vulgarest and apprised word like this natural true ear!"), or "Dick and Jane" ("Don't play blue ball as good as those green and green dogs now"). While generally less complex than Carpenter's work in terms of variety, users can add vocabulary to the poem identify its part of speech (i.e., noun, adjective, adverb), and edit the generated lines they have created. Quotes attributed to the styles of the authors (as seen above) are not entirely implausible. Another Web-based program, The Shannonizer (http://www.nightgarden.com/shannon.htm), is "a web toy with delusions of literacy" that gives a user the opportunity to "rewrite" input texts. Built on the premises of Claude Shannon's information theory, the program supplies "editors" named Lewis Carroll, Raymond Chandler, God, Miss Manners, Edgar Allan Poe, Dr. Seuss, Hunter S. Thompson, and Mark Twain. Here the results of the programmatic processing are not only effective, but humorous. A software program called Gnoetry (http://www.beardofbees.com/gnoetry.html) has also produced a number of compelling poems by completing a statistical analysis of pre-existing texts, although the program is not yet publically available, as are the others mentioned above.
While I have a special appreciation for the playful and often serious ancient generators discussed in my book, these recent generators are amongst the best yet produced. They indicate a desire for the virtual embodiment of known forms, styles, even authors. Are we facing a scenario where the dead poets might somehow, at least textually, come back to life, bringing new verses to wanting readers? What an odd, but yet not so far-fetched a possibility. In 2006, while living in Malaysia, I was approached by an Iranian professor who had heard one of my lectures on digital poetry. His attention to my research involved our common interest in generated poetry. He proposed a surprising collaboration: that we use AI (Artificial Intelligence) related Neural Networks information processing techniques to write new Rumi poems. What we needed to do in order to make this happen was to build a vocabulary, then teach the machine how to speak like Rumi. It was a refreshing, alternative approach to the task, and one that might work if we were crafty enough. But due to our physical separation (I returned to the US), unfortunately, nothing ever happened with the scheme we concocted.
The moment at which a poem is generated is a fusion of mind and world, or thought; often a captured, crafted observation, stated with a sense of sound or lyric. Can such occur as a result of the relationship between the software/algorithm, the interface, and the reader/participant? If so, perhaps a refined program could endlessly create unique transformative poems. Can, at one moment, the materials be-like a dormant or unknown thought-one thing (i.e., a set of words in a database), and at another they are something else-words shaped into a conceptually infinite poem? Production of serial texts in this manner, mutations and manipulations of the language of a database, opens the possibility of a continuous perpetuation of language and ideas. Emerging during a period when poets, critics, and others newly explore the relation of language to the world, this form of expression pays particular attention to language as a system with variable properties. When we encounter a computer poem, we see a representation of our highly technological world, but couldn't there be more than that? Within the myriad types of expression, artists working in this often seek to expose, and sometimes subvert, the various binary oppositions that support our dominant ways of thinking about writers, literature, and about communication in general.
Image by zen, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
- 11-26-08
- Christopher T. Funkhouser's blog
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i don't know what to say about this except
I'm a gum ball poet in a machine,
with a software inside
i'm a quantum computer from the cosmos crossroad future
with a poet's hard heard beware heart
i live in a above below in out flux and fire written
on a tickertape chinese fortune cookie paper
the poem began on the bathroom wall in a underground
train station one midnight coming back from North
Beach
reading when poets were poets and Howl was a spark
in a young Frisco poet' eye when Blakean tigers roamed
the deep
alleys between China and New Orleans when the king
of jazz nights wandered endless labyrinths of Egypt
in his dreams he walked down endless corridors flanked
by huge columns of ornate tongues speaking infinities
views through blue rectangles way down at the end
of this telescoping vision seeing the sand texts and moving
serpentine grids of a computer of the stars whose body
sauntered like some Nefertiti through holy mirrors as
years melted away her profile became cut into eternal
return stone as the arcane saxophones played like gods
through the endless streets of Moore's law they held
the ancient light bulbs up to the moon and swung them
incense burners as the slow stars revolved around his
great head held to the hieroglyphic floods of rhythm
I'm a gum ball poet machine head lost in starving
holocausts of locusts and locomotives raging in rags
through fireplaces and forests of postage stamps mailed
to a shaman when he takes the celestial brew to venus
when gumballs fill world war I trenches in paintings
that were never done by the corpses that still lay in photo
graphs that have the far away long ago look still as leaves
make good markers next to the ranks of dead men who
once wrote love letters to home and poems to remember
that in the thick of the din of battle some angel smiles
or there is some moments that trade places with other
ones that can not explain how that last charge into no
man's land was suddenly broken into by lights over head
cannot explain the great checkerboard stretching into old
torn skies and bleeding suns raining on boxes of matches
with postcards of french ladies dancing in perfumed rain
as the child puts his shiny coin into the slot and turns
the crank the poem balls come out with each chew comes
another passage from Baudelaire or from one of the
junky poets of the electric generation writing for that fix
cooking up the china white or afgan goo to full the spoon
and make the narcotic words blossom in streetlamp
lines that walk like prostitutes on the corner of forever
and never so the language may be sung as it sinks down
the last drop of flowers of evil spilling unconscious drag
I'm burst of bohemian flavor gumball of crystal dimension
melting in your fortune teller reading in sphere of music
to the lost dead ends of forgotten poems that never
say what they really want to say never speak free that out
of sight out of mind follow the ass like it is
of forbidden revolutions sweeping the thoughts of time
down steps of neon temples to the hyperspace poets of
chaos and looking glass upsidedown insideout macrochip
whose memories fill quantumbites of cyberdelic when the
world like a Lorca green gum ball falls into the childs hand
turns its crop circle earth computer holy mirror of mirrors
through the gathered fields of our books of living symbol
and that extra added element of unexpected fearful if
tearful symmetry perchance we see the burning bright in
cosmic core labyrinths of eternal delight starry night
the poetry written with inks of bliss and darkness
revelation and shifting Picasso poem in beastly
hallucinated woman dancing in the land of a thousand
and one
hmmm
ok Funky Houser...
What in the world
speaking planarly
I dig it, I was just flabbergasted by the robo-cop poem generato
God's Style
I'm reminded of a conversation I had years back with a NY cabdriver--I think he was Muslim. He thought the notion of Jesus Christ as God was absurd. He said if God became a living person, then we could clone him, which he obviously considered ridiculous. I thought it was an interesting point and something a theologian might fruitfully play with. I only sensed a depth of possibility in the notion, however, and didn't give it much further thought.
I have a similar idea in response to this article. I love poetry, and read this intriguing article as a former English major. But now, I can't help but wonder at the possibility of programming something by the Gospels. Or any other religious text that claims to contain the words of God. I'm not particularly dogmatic, just philosophically curious, and I'm thinking about the ramifications of a program that could emulate God's style. Could the great religions trick out a new text with the same stamp of approval, written with the voice of God and bearing His authority?
And this whole pursuit sounds close to cabbalah.
What if we could create a new Fire Sermon, or a new Sermon On The Mount, or a new Ten Commandments--you get my gist.
And now I'm reminded of Space Ghost, who, with Charlton Heston as guest, proposed a new commandment should Heston decide to film a sequel to The Ten Commandments: Thou who smelt it, dealt it.
Scientific Buddha
I think man has corrupted religions so much over time that anyone with any common sense can smell it a mile away. I also know that there are messages within the texts that give my nervous system a rush of blood to the soul. I know what I believe is true because I've seen, felt, and experienced miracles that can't be explained. But I also know when you and I look up we may see a different shade of blue but we're looking at the same sky.
It's almost impossible to make someone believe something they think isn't true, there's no logical reasoning in that. We've lived in the greatest country in the world, where everyone has the freedom to believe what they choose to believe.; It's been our first amendment right, and more importantly it's our divine right.
When we see something with our own eyes it becomes tangible and appears real, so we have a tendency to believe it's real. Some would call that to be true. Where as "faith" is the belief in things unseen, which despite all logical reasoning would make faith appear to be false. These systems of defining truth are based on individual perspective, so truth as a whole becomes a paradox. This methodology of how we perceive truth, knowing it is a "paradox" based on logical reasoning, should be the key to understanding "why" what's happening to us is happening.
When we believe something is true it allows for the clever trickery of that truth to be manipulated. Deceit is the concealment or distortion of the truth for the purpose of misleading. Then there's another form of deceitfulness called duplicity that leads one to give two impressions, either or both of which may be false. And in today's day and age, where the magnitude of political, social, and economic corruption are at it's highest there seems to be a cunning form of deceit in the likes of which we've never seen.Recognizing these forms of deceit is very difficult, and when they're recognized is even harder to try and make others perceive them.
The wonderfully destructive gift of free will allows us to all make our own choices about how we choose to view and act in our lives. We are all capable of amazing and horrific things, however there are some people in this world that only seem to be capable of the lurid acts.
I have lived a life that was largely filled with making terrible decisions, and as ghastly as it was I'm thankful for all of that pain I inflicted on myself because through that suffering I experienced humility. And the wisdom gained through that experience has allowed me to see the world in both the eyes of a good person, and from the eyes of an evil one.
As much as I've learned I still realize that I know nothing in the grand scheme of things. Fortunately, however, when I seek the truth with honesty and an open-mind it finds me.
The three stages of truth are:
1) Ridicule
2) Violent Opposition
3) & Acceptance
Nothing is constant but change. If anything in nature stops changing it ceases to exist. People fear change, but it's inevitable. We all see and feel the world changing more rapidly than ever before, and we're going to experience some things very soon that are going to shatter the illusion of what we thought was reality. The evidence is right out in front of us if we choose to accept it. "Prima Facie Duty"
Blessings -Free-WiLL- "The Rabbit Hole Goes Deep"
everything is genesis
There is nothing that is not genesis,
everything is in beginning or not in beginning
we are and are not innocent of this perpetual creation
if i were to show you an image inside a little manger
inside a deep inside rung rung rung where the poet Dante'
picked up the hot line to Hades he wasn't seeing down
time lines to no Mercedes
looked a little longer and a little stranger
if i were to say that there is not a image that is not inside
of this inferno of the imagination inside this peep show
like some little snow glass child gentle and mild when
you turn it over it snows in the desert with yonder star
for if we were to see the deep place that the poet's voice
cries from we would see the beginning at the point from
where it once was envisioned at the first envisioning
there we should see that where seeing had never sought
beyond the horizon of what never thought to peer over
there never was a beginning that was not beginning
never a babe in a barn yarn but some evolved revolution
in the making
If in the first page of the greatest poem ever written
were not some garden and some naked female body
before we care about the naked male body we would
have to that the ulimate poet ....the serpent in the tree
see my slithering forking tongue as i figure eight
through the branches you take your chances
that the greatest poem ever written is going to bite
you between the eyes in the place of the all seeing
remember what you have been told is made of lies
the lies in the begining are the lies in the end
rolling them scroll credits rolling back revelation
had a attack of the jypsum flotsam and jetsam
before we had lies we had no lie the snake did not lay
waiting to spring on you the teller of the lie was not
some figment that waited to fig your naked sex organ
grinder with that monkey on a chain with a tin cup
there was never no shame or blame from no knowledge
of no good and evil is what i'm telling you
the apple was stark too as were the other trees
in the paradise all was naked and all were wise
and if the fruit was not an apple but some other
exotic round sweet and jucy thing
then there is no sin sin sin
only the poem poem poem and what Dante's wild
only the shape we in
only the roots can bare the horns
and blow through the hurricane storms
blow all the way down from the land of the sky
blow away all your illusion all ya dream she be
what she seem Eve is a stripper dancin on that pole
that axis bold as love that goes all the way this here earth
she is movin and belly rollin up and down that shaft of life
she has that witchy craft to be removin each thread
each stitch taken off garment by rag by veil it all comes
off, gloves off, mask off, and there where heaven lives
she removes the last flimsy cover, the final underground
is pulled all the way to the world bottom floor
New York, New York, smilin up there in neon gaudy grail
time square eternity and all that glitters is gold
now the real dance starts all the fashion model stars
shooting craps through the flesh traps and rattle deaf raps
a comin along that ramp struttin they stuff enuff
they got them designs and all that bump and dump
fountains of shooting stars all powered up and primed
turning them balls of diamonds around and around
she is making a devil christmas tree on the top
of the empire of fire and ice loaded dice
on the foundation of high rolling symbols that look down
at the people that hold all the kings and aces fancy
but they can't find their kinky keys geez Louise cracker
jacks in pockets but they all ways play against the house
and the queen always plays the last card of thee wild one
Oh, joker, oh gypsy, oh the lady sings the blues
we ain't got no news, yes we got no banana, got me no
quantum mechanical subtraction we got duck soup
got scratch got the house of the rising Sun in them low
muddy waters got the fire down below in the ring
of desire and the funky flames keep dancin higher but the
stakes are can't get no higher we got star gates and
and gates gate paranoid gate got hidden treasure and
heaps of divine comedy and punch and judy
of roller coater rides through the swinging doors of
depth perception and chrome yellow to clockwork
orange submarine upsidedown pineapple 007
of para para squat twos para nines paradise gates
tricks is tricks and tracks are tracks keep layin em
down keep puttin another thin dime in the nude juke
this ain't no joke because the fallen angels tellin none
they been sayin that paradise lost before the rune bones
were tossed before the eyes where dotted and them lines
crossed between the devil with a blue dress on and venus
on the mount mound sayin all them chancy mancy mutter
moan utter neither neither flickering silencers to upper
ferments snaking through mazes mute text taxi a moany
and fling that lousy ten of hearts to the green from
time square to square times dimension to Picadilly Circus
the grass is growing through the blasted big Ben clock tower abandon all
dope here.....Dorothy and Zardoz hold hands goin
down the 2012 floor elevator
geode amethyst fang gutters splashin them pearly girly
hurly burly whirly gig birdy early shimmerin let me take you
down to the fairy meadows...cuz were goin too...
There's many inconsistencies
raising the God son roof 200 proof Budha call fear goggles...
I feel no bliss in my ignorance
Thanks for the insight, especially into Asimov.
I cherish philolgia, even when it conflicts with beliefs engrained in my vegatable. I never employ my etymologies with Plutarch's approach, I just absorbed that from the culture of my generation. As sad as some of it seems, and is, I still like the ring of a well balanced rhyme. 12 years ago I wrote "Sometimes the power of my rhymes aren't intended, but destined to leave an impression." Words flowing from the unconscious stream probably don't have the same laws as our vegetable.
According to Aristotle God is an argument of reason. And my argument based on belief seems to fit in the "modes of persuasion". However, as wrong as I may be, the connotation of using persuasion to make someone believe something, was far from what I was saying, and it can be easily seen as manipulation.
Let me just reiterate, I don't think that I'm right and anyone else is wrong. I know perception is based on individual perspective, and I respect that in everyone. I get very passionate when I feel misunderstood or falsely classified on my beliefs. Everyone is entitled to their feelings, they're neither wrong or right- they just are.
And thank you for helping me rediscover another moral and intellectual imperfection. The Stoics would be having a field day with this... :) FreeWiLL
as an aside
Imagine...
#that you're enlightened...
#the boundary between Rumi and Rumsfeld dissolved.
class CsomeClass {
public:
short x:
void DoIt ();
void DoItAgain();
}:
Class==Christ_Hitler_vagabond_preistkings.
struct{
Initiate_stillpoint_aquisition;}
destruct{
Dissolve_not_self_illusion principle}
void communication_as_if <ctrl>
:return
methodless being debugging ritual wordplay...
no input method only struct,
<ctrl> undefined parameter,
destruct is an invalid method,
no insertion point for return.
picking clean the exquisite corpse, parlor game widgets...
of hacklums of slacklums,
and their asc2 digits,
picking and sticking, their flumoxing digits,
on keyboards and billboards and boxes of flockses.
they bang out the klangout putout by hackses.
with twiddlypee toys and intent to besoil,
they take out of context and poems despoil.
Time better spent in pursuit of a trade.
doing mod interfaces writ using Glade
a game for beginners to learn how to write,
w/ a blissful approach thats not too uptight,
might succeed in enriching the user and reader,
and codemonkey once laid,
might then become breeder.
seriously,this is a waste of Oxygen on braincells...
write with substance
substances? as far as rules, goes writing does involve telling your truth. and as far as computer generated poetry, kinda takes the truth out of it, as far as the personal experience the poet or writer has to work with. as far as it being aesthetic, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. but as Breton said, beauty must be convulsive. and as far as kids needing to learn how to tell their truth, writing is more a thing of the street, then sitting at some computer, even if there is a mountain of writing on the computer. its kinda of a catch 22.
one other thing, writing is not like being on RS and being in an airtight atomsphere where there are hall moniters, that sterilize the dialogue.Where people make remarks that seem calculated to insult others intelligence, or it seems that way.So again as far as writing, real writing, its difficult to tell the madness from the mad hatters.So say if you have a Swiftian type remark or a Mark Twain, then it will send out better signal to noise ratio, then just writing that is a remark that is directed at others, to just get attention.How far would a Henry Miller get on one of these blogs, before he was attacked twelve ways to never on a sunday, or flagged by the church lady?
yes
machine garbage
hey
but yes again...
why do you think
do you think...
looks like a higher class gal...
its all new to me
Well, I've been waiting for