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.
I put the quiz in because of the discussion about computer-written novels. Here’s my prediction: In the distant future when machines can write OK novels, if the audience demands novels written by people, then the publishers will write novels by machine and Milli Vanilli them. Human authors are slow and expensive and cantankerous, which is bad business. Getting caught would be acceptable, because a sensation is good business.
So I figure there’s no point in demanding human authors unless you can recognize them!
Free bonus! Here’s another McPoet verse. Is it true?
chaos prays for a weird predestination
chaos slaves for
the prince that
she sows
chaos
longs for a capability
originally written August and October 1997
last updated August 2015 with fixes for broken links