poetree | Entries tagged with themed week: digital found poetry

For my last post of the week, a bot account entirely on Twitter; pentametron. This account finds and retweets pairs of tweets that happen to form rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter. (At first, it just did single lines in iambic pentameter, but then it got access to more of the stream of tweets, and began doing couplets.) It also has its own website, pentametron.com, where you can see seven couplets at a time, formatted into sonnets.

The only direct control is that the bot's programmer has restricted certain phrases from popping up, if before they were getting rhymed over and over again. (Something like "I wanna watch the hunger games again!" was apparently very popular a year or so ago.) So, the bot will pair together two different messages from completely different users, with no expectation of sense. With literally zero expectations, any time it rises above that to create something surprisingly meaningful, it's entertaining! Sometimes a live event is going on (holiday, major sporting event, election night) that prompts a lot of people to tweet similar messages at the same time, so then the couplets will look coherent based on that.

Another touchdown! Ravens all the way!

No power for the Super Bowl? Okay.

Other times, we'll get random coincidences.

what is the definition of a friend?

We stand together till the very end.

(As an aside, ten syllables is not a lot, compared to the one-hundred-forty character maximum for Twitter! So the content comes across as relatively short.)

Another amusing note is that every once in a while, the "human" writing one of the tweets for the robot to come across...isn't human either. The bot @stupidcounter spells out numbers as words, increasing every two minutes--and once you get up into the hundreds of thousands, a lot of English numbers themselves are iambic pentameter. So, for the Yuletide fanfiction gift exchange, someone asked for a story "shipping" @pentametron and @stupidcounter ...and I obliged. (Everything centered in this is a verbatim couplet from pentametron. Everything off to the side is me, writing in imitation style.)

primeideal

We're stepping away from blogs that self-identify as being poetry, but I think this builds a good transition between the Tumblr blogs I've set up so far and my final example. Today's blog is Anagramatron, which scans Twitter for two different Tweets that happen to be anagrams. There is some manual control, for ruling out the cases when, for instance, two people post exactly the same thing. Or, when a typo of transposing two letters or words leads to substantively the same message.

There are, however, many coincidental anagrams out there. And allowing various punctuation in the two copies (including but not limited to Twitter hashtags) can allow for even more diversity of meaning.

It's dark in here. o n o

Inside North Korea

I wonder is it love ???

I lied, it's over now

#falldownthestairs

The final last words.

Overslept again

I love great naps!

I had the best night ever!

eh ive had better nights

The last one in particular I find interesting, because it reuses one of the important words (night and nights). If someone was trying to construct a clever anagram from scratch, this repetition could be seen as an inefficient use of the letters. Similarly, deliberate misspellings sort of defeat the purpose of building one's own anagram. (Yes, there is a community of users who have identified the hallmarks of a good anagram! Including being well-mixed and spelled well.) Here, the spontaneity of two different users inadvertently collaborating (in my opinion) makes up for these departures from the ideal. Natural misspellings open the door to a much wider range of coincidences.

Anagramatron FAQ

primeideal

Another Tumblr blog that is up-front about its found poetry also employs a very popular website, but relies on users to send in the poems they find. I speak of Google Poetics, a site that groups together (usually four, or sometimes several sets of four) lines that result from the same attempts at a Google Autocomplete.

In my opinion, these can actually be interpreted pretty well by intentional poetic standards. Like many good poems, they have some elements of formal structure--in this case, usually a repetitive beginning to each line. But they also are full of surprises--the first three might set up a pattern that the fourth breaks, the last line might cause you to interpret the others in a new light, and so forth. The importance of "lineation" and surprising but meaningful line breaks is key.

For instance, the search term "Would any" prompts...

would anyone care if i died

would anyone miss me

would anybody die for me

would anyone care for a bon bon

While, "what will h" prompts...

what will humans look like in the future

what will happen in the future

what will happen to canadian pennies

what will happen to all the pennies

Because Google picks up on alternate spellings or contractions of words, sometimes the exact formal repetition breaks down.

one day we will a

one day we will all be free

one day we will all die

one day we'll all be ghosts

one day we'll all understand lyrics.

(Which is, in my view, much improved if you don't know that "one day we'll all understand" is itself a lyric that people are curious about. Instead I thought "eh, in the present time some of us fail to understand lyrics to songs in general. But things will get better, down the line!")

Seeing some autocomplete results can also inspire you to try alternate search entries, which leads to "longform" poems of sets of searches pieces together. The curators, so far as I know, are a little stingier about how many of these they post. But I'm not sure. Again, it's part of the magic of Google that existential longings are mixed right in with pop music lyrics--sometimes uncited. As above, I think it might be funnier if you don't know which is which.

Yesterday

Bluebird

Here's the FAQ page. Like the Times Haiku, they post in image form--in this case, direct screenshots of the Google drop-down box. I do think this form is a little more entertaining than the haiku.

If you like funny autocomplete results, there are a couple fun non-poetic backlogs around the internet... US States map and Sporcle Quizzes for countries of the world and Shakespeare characters.

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!

primeideal

Hey, I'm primeideal and I'll be hosting a week on "digital found poetry." I'm not really crazy about this name, but I don't know what to call these various web sites I'll be writing about--to me they're all under the same umbrella, but it's hard to pin down how, exactly, to describe the umbrella.

Most of these can be considered some forms of "found poetry," which is a catch-all term to generally refer to language that's found in a context other than consciously-created poetry, that's later reinterpreted as poetic by some other person.

In general, I personally don't enjoy most found poetry. Or, put another way, I don't share the mindset that seems to lie behind some (though not all) found poetry--if there's a sort of self-imposed humility, a fear that being deliberate in picking one's own words is passe, or that it's cool and newfangled to "poetically" "interpret" someone else's text instead.

However, I do enjoy texts that correspond to formal constraints. And in this day and age, it's easier than ever to--not only have a large corpus of text to sort through--but to come up with automated ways of parsing it and pointing out various coincidences. So, throughout the week, I'll be looking at different ways people have used the social networking sites Twitter and/or Tumblr--as well as more old-fashioned sources, like the New York Times--to share snippets of interesting text. Coincidences and formal wordplay abound, but meaning is--as always--what you make of it.