Poems.io

Machines made out of words

[poemsio]

The Prisoner's Keyboard is a creative writing project I released today. 

Based on the Prisoner's Constraint, an Oulipian writing game, the Prisoner's Keyboard lets you remove particular letters from appearing at all.

This empowers you to create lipograms, writing in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided. (For a classic example of lipograms in action, check out Christian Bök's Eunoia.)

I'm still diving into the iOS 8 Custom Keyboard framework to see what other neat ways I can facilitate creative writing, but I thought this would be a fun start.

Check it out!

[timeshaiku]

A haiku from the article: A Job Seeker’s Desperate Choice

[poemsio]

The New York Times finds haikus tucked away inside its articles and posts them on this tumblr

[poemsio]

“He liked thick word soup” is an app created by Ariel Malka that presents the text of James Joyce’s Ulysses in an entirely new way.

The execution is very slick — I’m excited to check out the underlying code, which is on GitHub. And Ulysses, with its enigmatic schema of repetition, is the perfect source text.

Mobile devices, specifically the gestures they support, have tremendous potential for changing the way we interact with text. Like visual and concrete poetry, Malka’s app encourages us to explore text-as-object, rather than text-as-information.

[poemsio]

The Deletionist is an erasure bookmarklet. It converts any webpage into an erasure poem, using an enigmatic system called "The Worl." 

Above is a Hamlet-inspired take on Craigslist.

[poemsio]

The School for Poetic Computation is a New York-based organization running an intensive 2 week workshop this spring. Its founders are a group of talented artists and hackers who do things like challenge students to make a game about binary numbers (video above) and release their financials on GitHub.

The application deadline is Friday March 28, and you can apply here.

[poemsio]

William Carlos Williams, in his Introduction to The Wedge, writes:

To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant. Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character…

I wonder what WCW’s idea of a machine was in 1944. Today we don’t think of machines as not having redundancies. When I look at the back of my TV I see a lot of stuff I don’t need, for example. In engineering, redundancy has become desirable in many cases. Is this kind of redundancy the same kind that WCW is talking about? Are failover systems “sentimental”? In what ways is a poem like or not like an algorithm or a snippet of code? Code can certainly be redundant; snooty programmers shit-talk each other’s code all the time. Kind of like snooty poets… And in this sense, it doesn’t really matter that WCW is wrong when he says machines cannot contain redundancies. The topic just changes from “what a poem is” to “what a poem should be.” If you embrace the definition of a poem as a kind of a machine, then doesn’t a beautiful poem have the same qualities that beautiful code has? And isn’t one of those qualities efficiency, ie., a lack of redundant parts?

[captainsqualid]

Gertrude Stein writes: “In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.”

Screenshots of a little app I’m making at 2a, 8a, 2p, 8p.

[poemsio]

Source text here: http://www.bartleby.com/140/2.html

[poemsio]

TechCrunch and Vice magazine recently covered the work of Nate Matias at the MIT Media Lab. Vice was predictably sensationalist. Its headline: “Robots are writing better poetry than humans!”

Like BrainTripping and my own Today: A Text Adventure in Space, Matias’ work uses a language model to generate possible continuations in a composition.

In a way, the algorithm is the most obvious and least interesting part of such a system. There will be training data, tagged for part of speech, meter, sentiment, etc. A set of possible words to continue the poem will be generated and weighted by some likelihood score.

More interesting is the interface between human and computer — the method in which a set of possible outcomes is presented to and chosen by the user.

One aspect of the interface is the question of how much to ask of the user. One can imagine an “autopilot” mode, in which the algorithm composes on its own. Or a pure “manual” mode, in which the user chooses from any valid continuation. Or something more nuanced: a visualization of the “main line” but ways to deviate from that path.

And then there’s the question of how the user ought to interact with the language model. BrainTripping uses keyboard shortcuts. “Today” is gamelike and uses a “spaceship-asteroid” metaphor. Matias’ interface above seems built for touch. 

I’m excited to see Matias’ project live and in the App Store. Based on his academic portfolio, he seems interested in design structures, eg., The Hacktatus. At this point, cracking the question of composition interfaces seems at least as interesting as building powerful algorithms.

[explore-blog]

Honor any error as a hidden intention

Oblique Strategies – music icon Brian Eno’s vintage idea-generators for overcoming creative block, inspired by John Cage. (via explore-blog)

[anagramatron]

@Landoee_Staxx vs @Serious_Threat

I wanna do some freaky shit.

— MoCityLandoee ! (@Landoee_Staxx) January 23, 2014

I want a kiss on my forehead 😇

— RODeo_GYAL (@Serious_Threat) January 24, 2014

[poemsio]

Anagramatron finds tweets that are serendipitous anagrams of each other. These two make an odd couple.

[poemsio]

There is a tendency in painting (permanent pigments), as in poetry (printing, binding), to be secure in the thingness of a work, and thus to overlook, and place nearly insurmountable obstacles in the path of, instantaneous ecstasy.

John Cage

[poemsio]

Yesterday a few days he began to feel itself the soul of his phases as he would feel a Titan were so, the silly missive was that answered the great woe of Truth. 

Yesterday against the way, less the leaves of his own aspirations; nothing he had given, not at all great books were open. 

Yesterday as by the repetition of a general profile; so recklessly, that some relief in their authors had the smell. Yesterday it not give himself to himself up to all criticism of all the hand clung to what might be still absenting themselves, and drawing over his eyes, he was it was utterly without touching them. Yesterday will switch, switch away from there. Entranced, they split us to remain in its great victory. 

(generated by Today, a Text Adventure in Space)

[poemsio]

You need to always mobilize your observation skills, your taste and vision need to extrude just like a predator’s and you need to always dig in central squares and other neighborhoods to find something. You need to know just like an experienced gleaner where you can find what and where you will just waste your time. Maybe this isn’t something that a writer is supposed to do? I don’t know. But it’s really interesting and easy. You need to always leave your mind and soul open and the fresh wind of life goes through it and your role is to stop it every once in a while, in order for the wind to leave some footprints in you. And then at night when women and children are asleep, you start editing and cutting depending on what you like. It’s easier for you to write this way and you are smiling to all the thoughts and ideas from the notepad. You write all kinds of things and improve.

From Andrey Platonov's Factory of Literature, in which he introduces a manufacturing model to collect the "natural resources" of language, curate them, and finally write them into a story in which the author's contribution is "maybe 5-10%." 

[poemsio]

Pentametron is a Twitter poet who finds tweets posted in iambic pentameter, and retweets them in the form of heroic couplets.

Whether you'd call Pentametron a bot sort of depends on your definition of the word — I'd be surprised if there isn't some human curation done on the backend. (The human behind Pentametron is Ranjit Bhatnagar.)

Many Twitter bots "feel" mechanical. They produce massive amounts of output, much of which often doesn't make sense. Their human operators seem to be embracing, and deliberately exacerbating, the "problem" of information overload on Twitter (and the Internet in general). 

Pentametron has almost the opposite intention. Pentametron never creates content, only retweets it. Pentametron adds value where there was none, by matching up two unrelated tweets and creating poetry out of them. (Imagine, for example, how inferior the bot would be if it only retweeted single lines.)

People who hate poetry were at some point forced to write a sonnet in class. They remember with loathing the stranglehold of iambic pentameter. Pentametron shows us a world where we are composing sonnets all the time, inadvertently, in collaboration. 

There is nothing cynical, nihilistic, or "weird" about Pentametron. It is a delightfully optimistic take on automation. 

I think I like Pentametron's poems best on the website, where they are stripped of the context and metadata. Here is a sonnet Pentametron posted for the New Year:

song of the year okay okay okay

We Really Make A Year Tomorrow Yo If all the year were playing holidays Why laker tickets so expensive though God often works in unexpected ways.

Dang #Interception #Aggies still in it. Last physics lesson of the year today Upsets in college football are the shit!!! I really wanna dance the night away

It's been a year, and nothing is the same. I kinda lost myself along the way. We want the money middle finger fame! song of the year okay okay okay

aw they were lighting fireworks down the street First disappointment of the year ✔️ complete.

[poemsio]

BrainTripping, which Matthew Huebert launched in 2012, is a beautifully executed web app that allows you to "trip" on the brain of a famous person: Jesus, Kurt Cobain, Steve Jobs... 

In this case "tripping" means generating stories/conversations/poems in the style of a particular person. You can use shortcut numbers 1-9 to grab suggested phrases, making the writing experience fluid, almost automatic. Alternately you can type in your own text, so long as it's contained in the vocabulary of the person you are tripping on.

BrainTripping shares some qualities with Today. Both apps model language based on a corpus, and provide an interface for the user to guide that model to his tastes. 

Personally, I'll always find this interaction between human and computer preferable to "bots," which automate the output entirely. It's surprising and kind of a shame there aren't more apps like BrainTripping, considering the growing interest in bots and language modeling. 

[poemsio]

Today, A Text Adventure in Space, is now available for free on iPhone and iPad. Download it here. There is no typing in Today. Instead, you compose poems by navigating the “spaceship” of your sentence into, or away from, incoming “asteroids” (words).  Today is a small game, but I fess up to greater ambitions. Fridge magnets are well-suited for fridges. Burroughs' cut-up technique is well-suited for books and newspapers. My aim is to provide a new means of composition that is well-suited for mobile devices and the Internet.  There, Today undoubtedly comes up short. It's my first app and I’m sure it shows. It is crude, limited, janky. It likely has many bugs. I’m sharing it so that a few people may enjoy it, or, better, may want to work together on something new. To that end, I’ve spun up poems.io as a sort of loose collective for sharing ideas and projects around poetry composition in new contexts. If you’d like to get involved, you can give the blog a follow, join the Google Group, or e-mail me at [email protected].

Happy poeming.