machine writing answers

Most of them were written by computer programs.

Note that computer poetry programs are in a primitive state. They were put together mostly for fun. The programs don't use any kind of dictionary of word meanings or pronunciation, though such things are available online now. A serious attempt would start above the level of these programs and work up.

Compare the poetry programs to the more advanced programs EMI, the computer music program by David Cope, and the drawing and painting program Aaron by Harold Cohen.

(1)	Slide and tumble and fall among
	The dead. Here and there
	Will be found a utensil.

RACTER, 1984
From The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed, which was billed as the first book written by a computer. It turned out that most of the longer pieces were probably "written" by filling in big templates, which is boring, so I chose a short one. I put this first because some people will recognize it.

(2)	  restraining order
	cable teevee yuk-inspiring
	  because i said so.

lavarand, 1997
Purely random, but I like the idea that TV restrains order. Random puns are still puns.

(3)	ink: the hydrant of certitude 

McPoet, 1996
McPoet has a feature to create definitions. Perhaps one percent of them are interesting, according to the program's author. That's not as good a hit rate as a human's, but it can generate them by the thousand. I picked this one for its irony in this context.

(4)	  overanalyze
	heart of glass transmogrify
	  chmod mucilage

lavarand, 1997
"chmod" is a unix command. Just what you'd expect from a computer. However, it happens to make sense, at least to me: the haiku is about a geek with romantic troubles.

(5)	     with anger
	      disgustingly
	       anal 
	 Look! a
              p
	    ass
	able bureau
	        crat

McPoet, 1996
Art could be defined as the way "passable" is sliced in this poem. Too sensible to have been written by a machine? Maybe you should go to the library and check out some of the verses too senseless to have been written by a human!

(6)	Salt and pepper, god and slave,
	Dig a wormhole for my grave.

Jay Scott, 1997
The only human verse, not half as biting or well-coordinated as the one above it. I put it in because I think I know how to write a computer program that could not only write this, but more or less understand it--that is, it could write it for the right reasons, unlike any of the other samples here. Pronunciation (for rhymes and meter) would come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, and information about word meanings and relations between words would come from WordNet. WordNet could teach it that salt and pepper are shallow opposites, and that god and slave are deep opposites; that exact info isn't in the WordNet database, but plenty of similar stuff is. I made up this bit o' doggerel to show what such a program could do.