4 for Valentine's Day: Crash and Burn by Geoffrey Landis

Crash and Burn

Love starts with kisses and ends with tears.
They know your secrets. And you know theirs.

I'm tired and sad of feeling tired and sad.
This song makes me miss you and what we had.

crash and burn,
live and learn.

And that's why you'll always be crying,
And I’m quite aware that we are dying.

It's late, and I want to talk to you so bad.
I'm so confused and frustrated, and a lot sad.

crash and burn,
live and learn.

And I am so depressed, again, I tried to call last night.
I’m blind in the darkness and can only see the light.

I'm tired and sad of feeling tired and sad.
This song makes me miss you and what we had.

crash and burn,
live and learn
crash and burn,
live and learn.

 --Geoffrey A. Landis & the internet

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4 for Valentine's Day:

• "Valentine Blues" by Marcus Bales
• "Firefly" by Mary Turzillo
• "Crash and Burn" by Geoffrey Landis
• "Greenheart" by Dianne Borsenik

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Poet's note: 
This poem was abstracted from lines out of “the longest poem in the world”, a collection of tweets taken out of context from the twitter feed and paired by computer with other tweets into rhyming couplets.  Created by Andrei Gheorghe.

Haiku-bot writes "haiku" at NYT

Ok, everybody, repeat after me: just because it's written in seventeen syllables 5-7-5 doesn't make it a haiku.
But, the New York Times "senior software architect" Jacob Harris just wrote a software bot that trolls through the NYT, and extracts 5-7-5 syllable fragments-- "The New York Times has built a haiku bot," as Justin Ellis phrases it.

• Check it out: haiku.nytimes.com
• James Harris discusses the program

OK, you know my fascination with auto-poetry.  Few of these really rate as actual haiku. Still, here's one:

The buzzing of a
thousand bees in the tiny
curled pearl of an ear.

--well, that one's unfair.  It's from the book review of Kate Atkinson's novel Life After Life, and the part that the haiku-bot found and chose to extract for the haiku is a section that is quoting a passage from the novel.  So, as a novelist, Atkinson has quite a poetic ear.  Bravo, but no kudos for Mr. haiku-bot.

So, no, not really haiku.  Even the author, Harris, admits as much:
"...That's a lot harder to teach an algorithm, though, so we just count syllables like most amateur haiku aficionados do."

A few might be called relatively pretty decent senryu, though:

People often do
 what they have to do to make
 their story sound right.

or,  more sinister:

 It's hard to find your 

bearings in the middle of

 a cataclysm.

or even insightful:

Slowly, he began

 to believe those things that he

 used to say in jest.

I guess the haiku-bot a bit better at writing senryu than haiku.

But, looks like robots are starting to take over the business of writing poetry for us, and pretty soon we'll be out of a job.  I guess all that's left for us humans is to watch youtoobs and check out teh lolcats.  So, with that thought: have a happy National Poetry month, everybody!

• discussion at mashable

Googlesearch Poetry?

It's like flarf, but different. "'Google Poems' are hauntingly beautiful," says Alexis Kleinman.  The technique is simple: type the beginning into google, and let "autocomplete" finish the poem.  Here's an example:

Everybody is...

Everybody is a genius

everybody is a star

everybody is looking for something

everybody is fine.

Want more? Top googlesearch poems.

How hard could it be?  OK, I'll try it:



How Difficult Could it Be?

How difficult could it be to invent a new life?
how difficult would it be for a person to leave a gang?
how difficult would it be to consume a vegan diet?
how difficult would it be to go on hajj?

If it were easy...
If it were easy, everyone would do it
If it were easy
If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon ...
If It Were Easy It'd Be Your Mother
If it were easy, everyone would be doing it
if it were easy it wouldn't be worth doing.

• and, John Lundburg says "Robot Wins Jeopardy, But Can It Write Poetry?"

Tweet poem

Today's immortal lines from the ever-continuing tweet poem, the "longest poem in the world":

..."ever though you're singing and thinking how well you've got it made.
I just looked at this week's calendar and I'm very afraid.
And suddenly I'm not sleepy anymore. I'd die for some cereal.
Crap. I have to take a dump and I am out of reading material."

Somehow, that just says it all.

(see also earlier post at auto poetry, part 3)

Goth poetry generator

(Auto poetry, part 4)

In celebration of the coming of the Hallowe'en season, check out the Darkly Gothic poem generator.

Go ahead: write your own Eternal Love of Vampires Darkly Gothic Poem.
Or a Supernatural Violence & Horror Darkly Gothic Poem.
Or even a Black Abyss of Righteous Hatred Darkly Gothic Poem.

You probably won't get something you can submit to the Vampyr Verse poetry anthology... but I suppose you can always try.

Go wild! And remember-- just because you don't see the vampires...
doesn't mean that they're not watching you.

Tweet Poem (Auto poetry, part 3)

I'm not sure why
I'm so fascinated by auto-poetry generation.* It's not really "poetry" in any real sense, but perhaps the raw material of which poetry is made. It can be a Rorschach test, a stream of babble that we put together to give us look into our own minds, or it can be a kick to the commonplace consciousness, putting together images and thoughts in weird combinations, stimulating sparks of thought. I was amazed, for example, how both Jim Stanley and Shelley Chernin took the same "beatnik ramble" and put it together into different, but both quite insightful, poems

So, check out the "longest poem in the world": Romanian student Andrei Gheorghe wrote a 'bot that grabs the real-time twitter feed, selects out posts that rhyme, and aggregates these into a continuous feed, with about 4000 verses added every day.
OK, frankly, it doesn't really make much sense:

I bought the wine and gushers. You bought the broken heart.

Ready for the summer to end and fall to start.

Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise:

why do the bad girls get the good guys and the good girls get the bad guys

It's all false love and affection

and my lil pony collection

No, not really "poetry" in any real sense, but like a lot of auto poetry, it can be weirdly hypnotic. The tweet poem is a window into the collective consciousness, a look at an instantaneous zeitgeist which is equal parts quotidian and philosophical, romantic and mundane and cynical.
And every now and then there'll be a good line.

I used to have a handle on life. And then it broke.

Desperately trying to cut down on the booze and smoke.

(thanks to slashdot for the link)
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*Maybe because I'm too lazy to actually write poems.

The Policeman's Beard (Auto poetry, part 2)

After writing about auto generators of poetry last week, my thinking drifted over to the book The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, first published a quarter of a century ago, back in that ancient era of 1984 (in computer terms, that is like the bronze age). This is a book, half text and half poetry, the first book to be "written" by a computer program, "Racter". It doesn't actually make sense-- of course, half of the fun is the fact that it doesn't really make sense-- but Racter sometimes comes up with text of strange, sometimes hallucinogenic intensity:

Racter writes:
A hot and torrid bloom which fans wise flames and begs to be redeemed by forces black and strong will now oppose my naked will and force me into regions of despair.

Often Racter writes with the simple diction of a Dick and Jane primer:

Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. This is interesting.

I like that. "They have love but they also have typewriters." He should have stopped right there.

("He"? Why am I calling a computer program "he"???)

Various people discuss Racter's text. Tiff comments that it's questionable as to what extent Racter "wrote the entire book itself without the influence of a human helper, which is of course a good point-- if nothing else, the task of chosing what to put in the book makes a big difference. Lance Barton reminisces about it as a "a bizarre novelty". Which, of course, is what it is.

More amusingly, in Atari archives, Bill Chamberlain (who co-wrote the program) gets Racter to write about itself. Racter shows strange insight:

"...My own dreaming is daintily incited by the delight of these conflicts. A monograph or periodical on my fantasizing is understood by a physicist. A cosmologist can sing a conversation with a computing-device; I understand that. But a doctor or obstetrician? No! So I cleverly will cry to myself. Craftily, inevitably I am pondering about me. There are neutrons and quarks and protons in me. They assist me in fantasizing and dreaming."

I can say no more about myself-- there are quarks and neutrons and protons in me.

The book itself is available as a pdf.

Auto poetry

Writing poetry is hard!

[1] Fortunately, in this ever-changing world in which we live in [2], computers can do it for you!

If you want to kickstart a poem and don't know what you want to write about, check out "the original poets online random line generator". Or try this line generator.

Prefer your poetry rhymed? Once you have that first line, Pangloss will write a quatrain for you with his Rhyme generator. Check out this baby-- I just wrote it:

testing the rhyme generator
the blue babboon eats lemons on a daily basis
Gleam the wisdom of our ancestors...
Reality is a staircase leading nowhere.

Well, maybe that one isn't quite ready to send to Poetry-- needs a bit of polish, but there's something there I can work with.

If rhyme doesn't do it for you, and you'd like something a little more freeform, Pangloss's site will put together a beatnik ramble for you. Or if you want a bit more edge, let it write based on Howl.

If that rambles too much, why not borrow some lines from earlier (public domain) poems? Angie McKlaig's poem generator will help you do that. Or poem of quotes

Of course, I'm not really suggesting that you start using the computer-soup as a method of writing serious poetry. While you sometimes do get something amusing, at best it's more in the line of poetry so bad it's good, not anything that comes within a country mile of what you'd think about calling good. It's more like Vogon poetry [3], really. But how about as a source of inspiration?

"Language-is-a-virus's" [4] site will generate a poem for you, too. And if you want to see the nuts and bolts of poem generation ("interjection, abstract noun!/ the concrete noun transitive verbs like an adjective concrete noun."), Thinkzone's poem generator shows you that it's little more than Mad-libs (You can even, if you like, change the pattern, and add or subtract from the list of words.)

Try it out-- let me know what you find!

And if you get something good, post it here.

I can only end by telling you "Beneath the surface of discord the poets speak."

Whatever that means.


Footnotes:
[1] cf. Teen-talk Barbie, 1994
[2] Paul McCartney has claimed that the line he wrote was "in this ever-changing world in which we're living"... but it doesn't sound like it to me. He should learn to enunciate!

[3] "Vogon poetry is widely accepted as the third-worst poetry in the universe." -- Douglas Adams

[4] "Language is a virus from outer space." --William S. Burroughs