I cannot stop laughing.

I have begun composing some raucous, (nonrandom alas) music to perform
the wondrous lyrics of the very first run. It will probably sound a little bit like
Devo and Tom Waits assaulting each other at a miniature gold course.

I would beseech you to abandon the concise form a while , and reinvent the poetry generator. Here you are a bard trapped in haiku. Looking at your tremendously innovative prepositional pivot – I was thinking a macro approach would work nicely.
A phrase based system. Using articles and prepositions the way a blind man would use trunk and tail. The great bugaboo of poetry generators is repetitive grammatical structures, but it seems to me the thing to do would be to use other writers.

An active and heavy handed thesaurus modifying input piped from three to five text files,
a random seed, word skipping, and algorithmic inversions using the ’small’ word lists like articles an prepositions as markers and handles.

The files are stripped of unwieldy punctuation beforehand, made into lower case,
and piped into the generator with a random seed – perhaps user input for the percentage of each. You could generate something which was, for example 33% New Testament Psalms, 33% Beatles Lyrics, and 33% what I wrote last summer. It would in effect
‘borrow’ the structure and flow of those and if you were to use the same author -
Stephen King for example – you might even find new plot elements developing.
(Not realistically, but you know what I mean when I say to give the random meaning
fascinates like the emerald glow of Venus)

I know little about the business of programming beyond 8 bit Basic.
I worked with a code thug some years ago and he designed to spec something
which stripped and separated word lists for me. It was a randomized combination of
two text files on a roughly fifty fifty basis. I realized that an auto-thesaurus function
would renovate the proceedings thoroughly.

“The probity of your requirement is amity.” So that “All you need is love” doesn’t
clot in the middle of a masterpiece you’re not allowed to edit.

Alas both code and thug are gone. You seem an able brigand.
With your mad skilz, I suspect you will be piping together stripped word lists from
Google in no time at all.

When I win the lottery i will buy you a sports car. Done?

Cheers man, I am still giggling.

[phrase] [big word] [verb] [little word] [phrase]

perl -e'@c=split//," hetoaiw";@r=map{-65+ord}split//,"LCFAdAL^_ARAxLXA^AP^PEMA|EbHdErDbDkDp_jTR^tCTFXD^CjDxD}CmLdC~ChCXCL~RHP[mD|Sb]dTP_PmTC";$w[$i++/2].=$c[$_&7].$c[($_&56)>>3]for@r;{$_=$w[++$j%2?rand@w:rand 9].(rand>.4?" ":$j%5?"\n":"\n\n");s/ +/ /g;print;redo}'

Here’s the uncompressed payload of words, which is provided by the part of the program before the main loop, the block that is enclosed in curly braces:

the a to that it he with we at what who oh two how too hit hot eat wait hate heat tie tea wet ate hat wit owe oath toe awe woe wee thaw hew whet oat twee hoot tote whit whoa tee

A super-short poetry generator definitely has to do effective compression of language. Sean Barrett sent word of an artful program he wrote years ago to deal with this task from a different angle: he was interested in encoding all of a large lexicon of English, allowing some non-English strings to be in the data as well. His deepmoo accomplishes this with less than 10K of trigram data. The application here – a guessing game – is different, but the compression of English became part of the project because dictionary files couldn’t be used.

This has gotten me thinking more about the challenge of producing a syntax for lines and a shape for poems. The lines pf ppg256-1 are fixed as noun/verb, preposition, noun/verb; a variable number of words are drawn at random to form minipoem4’s lines. I’m interested in looking into higher-level structure might be generated in the same way individual letters are, with spaces and newlines being drawn instead, and also how a reasonable variety of structures might be stored more explicitly.

perl -e’@c=split//,” hetoaiw”;
$r=”LCFAdAL^_ARAxLXA^AP^PEMA|EbHdErDbDkDp_jTR^tCTFXD^CjDxD}CmLdC~ChCXCL~RHP[mD|S";
for(0..75){$x=ord(substr$r,$_,1)-65;$w[$_/2].=$c[$x&7].$c[($x&56)>>3]}
{$_=$w[++$i%2?rand@w:rand 9].(rand>.4?” “:$i%5?”\n”:”\n\n”);s/ +/ /g;print;redo}’

Also here, in case the formatting gets messed up. Some sample output:

oat
he too
that too that two
with
two
he awe to thaw
that hew at wet he hit
with who he hat with
what a wit that we the

how we
thaw that tea a oh to
wait to a to
hot
at
wait with wee we
thaw to heat to
that a that he what it hot
a tie
to
oat
with
wet

A while ago I experimented with generating asemic poetry by splitting public domain texts into arrays at every letter ‘e’ (this was using Python) and randomly recombining them. It doesn’t take much to imply meaning if the ratio of consonants to vowels feels correct.

Now I often generate text by combining random groups of 3 or more words from a source text I’ve written, which can be fairly different to the original and create their own meaning. Most of the images on my blog us this method.

Very neat program Nick! Really interesting output, and it raises a bunch of questions for me that may even drive me to remember enough Perl to modify the program myself. For example, I wonder how hard it would be to vary the word count per line so that the poems don’t form such rigid columns of words. That aspect really stood out visually to me, although I think it was over-emphasized by the monospaced console output I was viewing it in. When I tested reading the output in a variable-spaced font, it was easier for my eyes to actually read the poem left-to-right instead of wanting to follow the columns downward when I scanned it.

I liked the inclusion of titles. If nothing else, it made the poems feel more like they should have an individual identity rather than being part of one massive collective of stanzas.

Mac OS X:

1. Open Application > Utilities > Terminal
2. Copy the string beginning with “perl -le” and paste it into a Terminal window.
3. Press return in the Termial window

Linux or Unix:

1. Open xterm or your terminal of choice. In Gnome this is Applications > Accessories > Terminal, in KDE it’s KMenu > System > Konsole, and in XFCE it is Applications > Accessories > Terminal.
2. Copy the string beginning with “perl -le” and paste it into a terminal window.
3. Press return in the termial window