Is poetry only the domain of organic, meaning-making beings? Can only organic matter create original writing in response to input of information? Is it the same as poetry derived from human experiencce? Most of the time, the poetry that is created by generators is absurd and no more than an amusing curiousity, but some programmers developed more elegant and complex solutions over the past few years.
I found a few good generators online:
http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm
http://www.languageisavirus.com/automatic_poetry_generator.html
http://poetry.namegeneratorfun.com/
The following is a hilarious Gothic poetry generator:
http://www.deadlounge.com/poetry/created.html
You can change words and themes in this one. A lot to play with:
http://www.jelks.nu/poetry/dom/
and here's some information about a more ambitious project involving a program that can infer grammar and syntax rules based on internet texts. The program starts out as a blank slate, pulling words out of pieces of writing and using the rules that govern language to compose its own poetry:
http://www.alpha60.de/poetrymachine/poetrymachine.html
Enjoy! :D
Wow. The Gothic poetry generator makes me sound like a profound and tortured soul. Everyone
ReplyDeleteone can be their own Edgar Allan Poe with this.
Here's the poem I generated (while squinting my eyes to randomly choose from the drop-down
list):
Untitled
Around, all around, the mourners gather.
My dread grows as doom's scythe falls against my eyes.
It mutilates me, and darkly my
life's blood drips
to the cold, uncaring tombstones.
In numbness I try to run
while nothingness follows.
Now alone, my supplication falls upon bleeding eyes.
This is my doom.
Image @ http://i.imgur.com/hxNnU.png
I tried out a few of the others ... and feel this type of online poetry exercise makes the
uninitiated poet feel accomplished - which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I can see these
tools sparking an interest in creating one's own original poetic works.
I find that the random poetry generators are novel and warrant themselves to being shared amongst friends as an amusement.
But I wonder how much of generated poem content the user retains copyright of ... if any at
all. (I didn't find any info on the few sites I visited.)
Do you see poetry generators as a way of "cheating" real talent?
I don't think that poetry generators can replace real talent, because real talent comes frm within...it is not enough to understand the mechanics of poetry, which is what these generators are supposed to do. There's an urgency and a fluency that is lacking here - a vitality that is missed because the poem is not written by a real person...or maybe we wouldn't know if nobody told us that it was created by a generator? It's hard to say.
ReplyDeleteI also tried to find copyright material but had no lucky with this. Perhaps people are more honest than we realize when it coms to writing...everyone wants to express the inner self rather than just be complimented on how words are put together. Or maybe I am just overly optimistic and it's just that people haven't thought about the copyright issue enough!