Digital Found Poetry: New York Times Haiku

[primeideal]

The first "digital found poetry" blog I'd like to link to is the New York Times Haiku.

 

This Tumblr blog uses a computer program to count syllables in single sentences that appear in Times articles; it looks for sentences where the spaces of the words allow for a five/seven/five syllable haiku. I got into the blog in late May, with sports haiku such as

 

"The stadium was

visible in silhouette,

like a waning moon."

 

One of the things that intrigues me about these kinds of websites is the ratio of human to machine control. With the setup in place, nobody has to count syllables--they just turn the program loose on the articles, and let it go. However, an explanatory page notes that "human journalists select it and post it on this blog" when they find a worthwhile poem. It's not clear how many they have to reject, before posting a good one. Read Jacob Harris' About page over here. So there's some degree of choice when it comes to the "found" aspect of poetry--but the clear-cut rules for syllable count allow some objective metric of what qualifies as a haiku, for the purposes of this project. (Unsurprisingly, more complicated and subjective rules like "a haiku should include a kigo word that indicates the season" have been relaxed here.)

 

And yes, this was run by actual employees of the New York Times, which amuses me--you'd think maybe someone else would have come up with the idea and threw their program at the first highbrow publication that came to mind, but no, it's an in-house affair!

 

They also decided that they wanted to make their posts as images rather than plain text, the former option maybe a little more in keeping with the Tumblr usage? Personally, I'm not sure how much the project gains from that setup, but others may disagree.

 

Enjoy the archives!