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?