Winter Remembering

Leaving a candle,

only winter remembering

in night shadow eyes.

This is the first of Poesytron's poems to literally give me chills.  I post a lot of nonsense here, and that's even after sorting out the really bad output that makes absolutely no sense, no matter how hard I try.  (In case you're wondering, of all the output that I go through, I consider slightly less than half of it worthy of posting.)

But the question I've been asking all along is, if I give a computer some poems, and some simple rules for selecting words out of those poems, can it create meaning?  And if it can, can it create unique meaning--and say something new with the words it rearranges?

And this haiku gives me a resounding YES to that question.  One haiku in the input database Poesytron draws on uses both "candle" and "winter," and another haiku entirely uses "winter" and "remembering."  There is not a single haiku that uses both "candle" and "remembering"--and yet those two ideas work well thematically, linked by a common thread.  And the same can be said for any three words in this haiku.

This doesn't always happen.  I've talked before of Poesytron getting stuck on one haiku in the database, and if that were the case here, I wouldn't be so excited about this result.

Sure, there's some luck involved.  This haiku somehow came together syntactically as well as thematically.  Most of Poesytron's haiku have at least one "a," "of," or "the," stuck in just the right spot to break the syntax and jar the reader out of any potential flow to the poem.  But my goal isn't to give Poesytron an exhaustive list of rules and parameters to try and make it as complexly human as possible.  To paraphrase the great economist E.F. Schumacher, "Any fool can make something complex, but it takes a touch of genius to move in the opposite direction."  My goal is to find out how few rules you need before you generate something more or less "human"--and then, of course, to explore what that means for us as readers as we encounter poems like the one above.  What happens to the obvious "meaning" of the poem when we know Poesytron had no intention behind it?

I don't even begin to have an answer for that yet.  All I know is I find a poignancy in this haiku, and that isn't something that even I expected Poesytron to be able to achieve yet.

An Oldie But a Goodie

From Basic Instructions:

Panel 2 is essentially what I hope to accomplish with Poesytron.

Horse Grass

Highest divorce call

over the November nightfall.

Shadow lake's horse grass.

Electricity

Electricity

And all of     In single blue

Tip skinned hot tourists

Anti-Valentine

When I was picking out haiku Poesytron wrote with the word "love" in them for Valentine's Day on Tuesday, a few struck me as a little less than romantic.  So in case you weren't feeling the love this year, either, Poesytron commiserates:

Bliss loves.  Blue bell.  Some

cries, the left your memories.

Nowhere, sky.  More, bag.

Both sport love, loves you.

Foucault, you're postmodern, a

hawk of wind, brown rythm.

Tobacco pipe and

lovers shells, tiny shells on

souls unplucked as is.

Poesytron Valentines

Consider giving one of these gems to your loved one today:

Writing lady white

on a roar damp light, a sign

in boundless love red.

Shorter gotten blocks,

blizzard blocks, blizzard to a

square love, flat swift stones.

Coquettish love, a

in old of warm cigar clay,

the blossoms.  Her.  I.

Among grasses, water,

over lover of a new glove,

white smell when I... on.

Grandfather's pipe and

soprano, and both partners

love mouth, a sand wet.

Good nature's goodness.

More bag, cat, love, lipstick, words!

Poetry--blunt ice.

Bloom by a morning.

By small night, both partners sport

love single the drops.

Lovers memories.

Out memories! Hang from new

letter in looking.

Reminds poet, humble

is and one afternoon love.

Bliss.  Single grass call.

Storms Dribbling

When I first read this haiku:

rocky jewel the

song established the from skies

clearing storms dribbling

my brain completely skipped over the "the" in between "established" and "from."  What clear sentence structure, I thought, as my mind pieced it together as:

Rocky jewel.

The song established from skies clearing,

storms dribbling.

But, alas, Poesytron doesn't know grammar or syntax (and the way it's currently coded, it favors common one-syllable words like "the"), so the actual haiku is pretty nonsensical.

Questions

Going through Poesytron's most recently generated haiku, I was struck by this one, and how it very nearly forms a narrative:

Point.  What's deaf?  What's she's?

What's inside?  Dad says, where the

first snow, a autumn.

Drawing another Way

Snow predicted. The

sand signing names, a drawing,

another Way.   Cliff's.