Video Poetry Games

These have been created to take interactivity in poetry to a new level and I think that they are pretty fun (but somtimes confusing) to play.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-nelson/digital-poetry_b_824768.html#s242067&title=I_made_this

Has anyone tried playing these? Does it make poetry more engaging and fun for you?

I also saw some article about poetry and poetry related tasks featured in video games. It seems like an interesting idea to inspire a love of literature in kids who are busy playing games several hours a day. Do you think it would have worked for you if these existed when you were growing up?

Canadian Poet Expressed Through Spacing

Gwendolyn MacEwen was a Canadian poet who often used spacing in her poetry to create and control the rhythm of her poems. She is by far one of my favourite poets because although she utilized new technology in a way that enriched her writing, her poems were still full of colourful imagery, labyrinths of hidden meanings. She played with her audience, both in writing and reading her poems.

The Magician

finally then the hands must play mad parables
finally then, the fingers' genius
wave out what my poems have said;
finally then must the silks occur
                                                   plus rabbits
and the big umbrellas
be spun continually.

as you Lowe, in quiet irony
insire terrible skills of silks
                            or crash scarves vertically
as though miniature brains were held in fingertips
fantastic as of secrecy--

or my art being more a lie anyway
than the lie of these illusions
secreting realities in the twitching silks
or sacred sleeves
                           to twist or tamper them
to come out solid, in cubes or cups--
pull down then
                        silk avalanche of scarves
or play the cosmos on strings of human hair
                            as a wand cracks
and blinds belief and holds it knotted
         like an ugly necklace
         or a hopeless rope--

or you, Lowe, driving a spike through the head of a boy
as though magic were (and is)
a nail of steel to split the skull
                                                in either direction
to believe or not believe
is not the question.

finally then do all my poems become as crazy scarves
issuing from the fingers in a coloured mesh
and you, magician, stand as they fly around you
silent as Houdini who could escape from anything
except the prison of his own flesh.  

----------------------------------------------                  

She also wrote a prose-poem called 'Terror and Erebus', about an early expedition to the Northwest Passage. She wrote it for CBC radio in 1965. Here it is being rehearsed for an outdoor presentation. You can see how they take their cues from the writing, pausing where MacEwen broke her lines.Their rendition seems a bit comical and exagerated but the pauses originally allowed the mind to stay with the horrors experienced by the ship's crew:

Terror and Erebus

Meaning in poetry created with automatic generators

I decided that I'd play with one of the more sophisticated poetry generators that I've previously linked to on this blog. It's a kind of wild experiment that really made me feel like a deranged scientist measuring proportions of chemicals in the heat of the moment and never really knowing what the culminative effect of the chemicals will be.

I tried not to cheat and to choose words that are truly random and thematically unrelated to one another, but perhaps my attempts were futile because some part of my brain was already trying to predict how certain words would combine to form poems.

It's hard to say if this was truly a random poem generation experience. Even when I've done this with cut-out words and phrases from magazines, it didn't seem that random of a process. Here, i was hoping that the program would throw something random at me...and it gave me a taste of my own medicine...seeing as I chose many words that had to do with war, mythology and the spiritual planes.

This is what I got:

 



I can see meaning in this poem that has been generated without any conscious intention.

It is remarkable that a simple program has the capacity to write a thought provoking poem that can have emotional meaning to people and it can do so instantaneously. While a poem like this can take a human poet hours, days and even weeks to write and edit, the poetry generating programs can do so within the duration of a single human breath.

What's really extraordinary is that although the generators generate random sentences and cannot effectively determined the best sequences, a change in the arrangement of sentences in a generated poem can completely alter both meaning and mood of the poem, as illustrated by my example of a poem written by a program.

Although I was able to change words and choose from general moods and styles, I had no creative control over the poem that resulted from the experiment and yet, the result was still perfectly coherent, having both syntactic and poetic logic. This begs the question: can humans be taken out of the equation of poetry if a poem generated by machines can stir the emotions and provoke thought just as a human-made poem can?

Today, generators can utilize texts from news sites or randomly create texts from words chosen by a person. What is the future of poetry? Will having a varied and sophisticated vocabulary make someone sufficiently skilled to produce poetry that will be widely read? Is poetry going to be an industry in which craftspeople are replaced by machines and machine operators? Will we celebrate unusual insights offered by poems created by computer programs or recoil in horror from the inhuman creativity machines' cleverness?

The result is often something a lot like the cut-up techniques such as those employed by members of the Dada and Surrealism movements, appearing on the page through some unconscious process as if striving to mimic how meaning can be formed from accidental associations through proximity.

While scientists maintain that creativity cannot be produced in a linear way, the method appears to work well enough for poetry production. What are we to understand from this? Is English a language of nebulous meanings? Do our meaning -creating brains simply fill in the blanks between poetic generalizations? Or perhaps our emotions and thoughts are not as complex and unique as we'd like to believe they are?