EYE OPENER

Magic for a Monday morning: While you're finishing your coffee, move your mouse over the screen here and here and here. Now it's time to go to work. What a shame.

EAR OPENER

This morning also brings news of Ray Kurzweil's latest invention: the cybernetic poet, a software program he regards as an aid to poets in need of inspiration. The program works like a blender, apparently. It whips up rhymes and rhythms and mixes in words taken from any poems you choose to feed it.

The results? Here's a sample of cybernetic poems and haiku, and here's another sample.

To my taste but in no particular order, these are the best. This one is based on poems by Wendy Dennis and Ray Kurzweil and love poems by various authors:

Imagine now and sing,
creating myths
forming jewels from the falling snow.

Here's a cybernetic haiku, after poems by John Keats and Wendy Dennis:

You broke my soul
the juice of eternity,
the spirit of my lips.

Another cybernetic haiku, after poems by Wendy Dennis and John Keats:

Double dreams
hover'd about,
a lamp from my soul.

(By the way, does anybody know who Wendy Dennis is?) Here's a cybernetic poem, based on poems by Wendy Dennis and Emily Dickinson:

A wounded deer leaps highest,
I've heard the daffodil
I've heard the flag to-day
I've heard the hunter tell;
'Tis but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the despair and
frenzied hope of all the ages.

A cybernetic haiku, based on poems by Walt Whitman:

Ages and pink in Sex,
Offspring of the
voices of all my Body.

A cybernetic poem, based on poems by Robert Louis Stevenson:

In spite of old delight
And winter comes the streams
And I know that I can see the foam,
Here is full of dreams.

I suppose it takes investigation of the original poems to tell whether this is inspired imitation, as Kurzweil says, or merely plagiarism. I don't think it matters much. Not that plagiarism is OK. As one of my favorite writers has said "nobody owns words." It's words-in-combination that make the difference, distinguishing one writer's work from another's. Let's think of Kruzweil's cybernetic poet as a sort of recombinant DNA, shall we?

POSTSCRIPT: You can download a simple version of the program here, for free. Give it a shot, and send me your results.

November 24, 2003 1:23 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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