Research- Poetry in the Age of the Computer

 Poetry is a distinctly human thing, nowhere else on this planet can you find genuine examples of poetry. Of course, birds sing songs and wolves howl at the moon, but poetry is specific to us, the human race and our plethora of languages. Throughout this project I have given up a lot. I have given up my control of the entire creative process and laid it in the hands of the computer, allowing a code I wrote to create the art. Of course a computer can draw, that is a fact, but can a computer write poetry? Poetry that rhymes, poetry with emotion, poetry with meaning. This piece of research marks the beginning of that journey of discovery.

Personally, when I think of poetry I think of Leonard Cohen simply because he is one of my favourite poets, as well as musicians. Cohen's poems are special because of how delicately worded and beautifully put together they are. They showcase the intricacies of the human mind, relationships and emotions within only a few words. Take, for example, Cohen's poem entitled My Lady Can Sleep from his book The Spice-Box of Earth:

 

"My lady can sleep

 Upon a handkerchief

 Or if it be Fall 

 Upon a fallen leaf.

 I have seen the hunters 

 kneel before her hem

 Even in her sleep

 She turns away from them.

 The only gift they offer

 Is their abiding grief

 I pull out my pockets

 For a handkerchief or leaf." 

How could a computer mimic something like this poem? And, if it could, would the outcome be a genuine piece of poetry or simply a regurgitated franken-poem? There has actually been a decent amount of research done into this field. A great example being botpoem.com, a website that shows you a poem and you have to guess if it was written by a human or a computer. Believe it or not, it is actually extremely difficult to guess right a lot of the time. A digital artist/coder created this poem using only code:

 

"Whirling silence 

prophetic poses 

of shiny objects  

prophetic Crimson,  

temple  

Through the universe  

built with the meadow  

Through the plant lacking water   

one foot of madness  

Into which she lacks

of sunlight streams" 

 

The computer-generated poetry is simply created using an algorithm, yet it feels eerily close to being human. However there is something missing; the heart. It is an indescribable phenomenon; as a human, you can just feel that something isn't quite human about this poem, it feels familiar in an unfamiliar way. Which explains why 63% of people guessed that it was created using a bot however that means that there was still a percentage that fell for it and that is where the magic lays.

In her article entitled Computer Generated Poetry Will Knock Your Socks Off, Tisela Alvarez Trentini writes about the entire spectrum of computer generated poems/poets; from a simple bot that tweets short poems, to entire, full-length poetry. She mentions how Duke University student Zackary Scholl created a program that created full-length, automatically generated poems, Scholl then went on to submit his outcomes to online poetry websites to gauge reader reaction and one of his poems was actually accepted by the Duke Literary Journal. They were completely unaware that Scholl actually had not written this poem at all, but a computer did. His accepted poem reads:

 

"A home transformed by the lightning 

the balanced alcoves smother

 this insatiable earth of a planet, Earth. 

They attacked it with mechanical horns 

because they love you, love, in fire and wind. 

You say, what is the time waiting for in its spring? 

I tell you it is waiting for your branch that flows, 

because you are a sweet-smelling diamond architecture

 that does not know why it grows."

A beautiful, delicate poem in its own right, made all the more impressive, yet perhaps less impactful, by the fact that it was automatically generated using a computer. The fact that it is in fact possible to create real, believable, intricate poetry using only a computer program gives me endless inspiration. The possibilities will go as far as I can take them. Moving forward I plan on looking into the technical side of these works; how the program functions and how to create my own, unique program. 

Cohen, L (1961). The Spice-Box of Earth. Canada: McLelland and Stewart.

Kurzweil, R. Cybernetic Poet. http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/poetry/rkcp_overview.php. Last Accessed: 19th November 2020.

Trentini, Y A. (2017). Computer Generated Poetry Will Knock Your Socks Off. Available: https://yisela.medium.com/computer-generated-poetry-will-knock-your-socks-off-763c815a1b52. Last accessed 19th November 2020.

Scholl, Z. Computer-Generated Poem. Available: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vvbxxd/the-poem-that-passed-the-turing-test. Last Accessed 19th November 2020