Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Wax belches, Hades dances

Wax belches! Hades dances!
The carving, the-- a misty
in Snowman after


I love the juxtaposition here of Hades and a snowman.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Star Bomb

Bill Crow, snow from white
Star Bomb makes a somewhere of
handful.      A
                               On
                                                  Takes.


As usual, all of the formatting of Poesytron's haiku was imposed by me.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Snow, my stiff onions

This week, I'll be posting some wintry haiku generated by Poesytron.


Snow, my stiff onions.
Upper-- With boy go to the
snowfalls. Power on.


What I find fascinating in this one is how 'snow' shows up in both the first and last lines.  The Poesytron code attempts to pair consecutive words that get used together, so similar words often end up near each other.  Consider, for example:


ants! she the net the--
as by the snow birthday can't--
ninetieth blow blows


Here we get "the net the" and "blow blows."  In the second case, because Poesytron's database is so small (drawing on 500 haiku written by real people), I can actually track down how the similar words became paired together.  A bit of trawling through let me find these two haiku:

90th birthday
flickering candles
he can't blow out

            m. harper


second birthday —
he blows out all
the dandelion seeds

            collin barber

You can tell from comparing Harper's haiku to Poesytron's above the problem that comes from having such a limited database.  (That's something I'm working on.)  Once Poesytron picked the word birthday, it selected Harper's haiku (out of all haiku with 'birthday' in them in the database--a whopping three) for the next word, and it got stuck there, choosing can't, then ninetieth, then blow from the same haiku.  Then, assuming Poesytron picked birthday again, it then couldn't use it due to the syllable count.  So it went looking for another haiku that used birthday, settled on Barber's haiku, and chose blows for the next word.

This is exactly what I want to happen--words that often get used with the same words get used together.  There are more elegant ways I'd like to code this process, of course, but for now even my crude method is working.

Anyway, back to my original point--somehow, in the first haiku I shared, Poesytron went from snow to snowfall, just as it did from blow to blows, but yet it wound its way through several other words first--stiff, onions, boy....  In this case, though, it's not because Poesytron is 'smart' or that there is some cool linguistic chain that can be drawn through snow-stiff-onions-boy-snowfall, but because there are only so many words in the database (1,815, to be exact), so the laws of probability mean that there's a pretty good chance that two words which "go" together will end up in any given haiku.  (And if you're not convinced, read this.)