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.
# posted by Jim @ 8:38 AM 
