« REAL LANGUAGE | Main | LEGAL BEAGLES »

November 24, 2003

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.

Posted by at November 24, 2003 01:23 AM

Tell A Friend