Friday, September 28, 2007
Intention and accident
The other day I posted about designing with the intent of facilitating individual readers' readings. I also mentioned that there is a lot in this little poem that could be talked about, things like the balance between accidental (the result of random selection algorithms) and intentional (rules based) word groupings. While "Bitterly, blue breeze" may look as if it's the end result of some software alliteration factory, it's not. It's random. It happens. And it happens often enough that it's not really necessary to program for it. (BTW: Alliteration is almost always the first thing new entries to poetry generation try. It seems like an obvious and easy poetic marker. It is easy, but it is not an obvious poetic marker. It's merely surface. Poetry lives somewhere else, in some deeper, darker dimension.)
On the other hand the repetition of imperial is intentional (or rather the result of a defined grammatical structure that says to repeat an adjective found at a particular location--the particular word is random). Which gets to how poetic markers are very context specific. Whereas repetition works in "Intent" (the allusive title a total accident), it does not in this test result:
Shutting
Always forget a host, face angle season
side, as she must
The bullets, whose triumph is
departing, shows a shore
There she must be a
shore though she hesitates like
a reef
Always whet a host,
bullet shore season triumph, as she would
Hold her but
don't tell her
The repeated shore sure doesn't work, it very much detracts, bullet and season offend a little less, but not much. The hard part is in designing the software to permit the first kind of repetition and inhibit the other. They way I've approached this problem in Etc3 is to code specifically for repetition in a controlled way and to try to replace randomly generated repetitive words with synonyms. (Which obviously is not working really well just yet.)
The really hard part is figuring out where randomization contributes to the poeticalness (it's in the OED) in some ways but not in others.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Erica 1.0.1
I've deployed an interim etc3 release here. The most significant change is the addition of a grammar I modeled after selected lines from Sylvia Plath. As I note on the help page, that's not because I like her work (I don't), but because the "standard" poetic markers are so much in evidence there. I've learned a lot in working through this grammar, about what it takes in terms of syntactic critical mass to simulate originality, how to make an utterance self-referential, how to categorize words in ways that support and are supported by a grammar. (Learned enough, I think, so that I'm ready to model a grammar after a language poet--how's that for irony?)
As part of the installation, I trashed the poems folks had "composed" on the site (over 400), replacing them with a few from the Web site's tests. Most of the poems I've been posting here are from the desktop version's testing. So you won't see much duplication.
As I've said before, I vacillate between thinking that the generated works should be preserved (for whatever reason: to maintain a record of test results, to entertain visitors, to massage the ego) and that they should be immediately discarded after the initial reading.
Making more of less
It's the readers, of course, who "make" the generated poem, not me, certainly not the machine. But what the machine and I can do is to make it easier for the reader. Consider this result from one of yesterday's tests:
Intent
Bitterly, blue breeze held, like a ruby
vow
My body dwelling,
unknown and cherry, my ribs
dying
They cherish
Imperial mornings, imperial strange pains
Gay, delirious, strange as this shadow
"I drink affections," I whispered
Note that there are no terminating punctuation marks. It's possible to make it so, but not as easy as one might think. Because the grammar is designed to allow adjoining of TAG trees at various points within other trees, it is not the case that a tree can ever know whether it is concluding a "sentence." And writing a terminating punctuation node is difficult, because it might conflict with other concluding marks, such as the question mark. But this whole thing is hard. Why avoid this particular challenge?
As with everything here, there's a reason (not necessarily a good reason, but at least a thought-through reason). In this case, the absence is deliberate so as to give the reader as much leeway for individual interpretation as possible. In the poem above, the reader can read "They cherish" as its own discrete utterance (which it is in the syntactic structure of the poem) or as the subject-predicate prelude to "Imperial mornings..." Is it "They cherish. / Imperial mornings..." or is it "They cherish imperial mornings...." Each reader will make a choice, no doubt a function of their history with poetry. The programmer's job is not to legislate the reading, but to enable it.
There's a lot more going on in "Intent," but I'll leave those discussions for another day.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Due tell
I hope to resume commentary soon, and meditate on what I've learned in the last few weeks of building and testing, testing and building. For now, here's one of today's more interesting results.
Telling
There is no
discretion more courteous than darkness
There is no joy
simpler than discretion, ready, red, unthinking as
these stars
For how long
can I be
a riddle beside my
unthinking pain?
I am scarlet
Tell, tell
I abide what struggles
for us
Friday, September 21, 2007
Not to brag about it...
But this software is starting to rock!
Boasted
Now the built bushes
break in the rain
This sepia hue has
no grass for anyone
I excuse boats, I mutter
May I be new?
I boast about
Monday, September 17, 2007
These things
The MACHINE speaks of itself...
Of discomfit
These abide, poor, attended,
like noble walks
They fail
These things baffle
They spell
These things ask
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Chaos chained
Chaos
There is no focus fainter
than love
How they justified us,
these tripping fittings!
Our green spurs
go and hesitate
We have no memories
There is no childhood
more superfluous than sustenance
To save the grief of chaos
To illume pervading beneath a spar
Nothing so faint as a
report or a syllable, devastating a
wakeful spar
Pale as an ignitor
No one teaches chaos and
syntax, where limits and
boundaries and oceans
repair dismay
Closer and closer...
Holding
The nature of rot
Here are these
mad summers, from which a rose sweeps
itself
Already I can see sunshine, her
pale nature
There is no
sunshine more pensive than glee
The wind babbling my arm with her
own spying hand
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
These quick apparitions
Still more testing:
Fear
Pass no lover
to save the fear
of renown
The fear of
death
Somewhere a work is fitter
The notoriety of renown
The cloud daring our
breast with her own adjusting finger
Dower a hymn
Other as nature
Settling beneath a way
How they read
us, these quick apparitions!
Solemn, proud, quick as these lives
Friday, September 07, 2007
Posted without comment
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
That old dilemma - romance or street cred...
Erica is torn:
Of death
To sing breaking
beyond a thing
Before she came, a hymn
was small enough
Everyone owns a hymn,
where ways and states and mysteries hold
notoriety
Anywhere else an ear is
more celestial
Someone adjusts nature and progress,
where gentians and whole
and bills sob secrecy
This secrecy bears no relation to
lover, rose, grave, man
She likes consummate graves
But she would rather be sagacious
The writer-reader contract
Erica is developing an aesthetic. Poor thing...
Fear and oxygen
Everyone enjoins a compact, where accounts and
leaves and apparitions
afford secrecy
She likes yellow leaves
She owns what shines to her
She must be a
requirement
And she would
rather be clear
Afford some leaf to earn an
account of faith
She likes small cases
Somewhere a hue
is clearer
Going beyond a leaf
