the poetry thread.....

[invisibleplanet]

dedicated to phdBOB

hehe good idea, bob. i like this one:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

--Philip Larkin (1974)

so....what r u waiting for! post poetry in any language!

[amble]

"Ach", sagte die Maus, "die Welt wird enger
mit jedem Tag. Zuerst war sie so breit, daß ich
Angst hatte, ich lief weiter und war glücklich,
daß ich endlich rechts und links in der Ferne
Mauern sah, aber diese langen Mauern eilen
so schnell aufeinander zu, daß ich schon im
letzten Zimmer bin, und dort im Winkel steht
die Falle, in die ich laufe." - "Du mußt nur die
Laufrichtung ändern" sagte die Katze und
fraß sie.

Franz Kafka


sorry i can't be arsed to do a proper translation now but i love this one. maybe a software can do?

[Weishaupt]

very nice!

[phdbob]

TURNER AND MILIC'S DERIVATIVE COMPUTER POETRY

In 1965 Alberta Turner published a non-computer-generated poem called "Return" which was, as she later wrote in 'Returner Re-turned', 'a calender sequence of short, concrete sentences in thirteen two- and three-line stanzas describing each month of the year and beginning and ending in January' (1971, 387). The first two stanzas of Return were:

Â*Hemlocks are nearly round,
Â*Deer paw the pond,
Â*My dog squirts the porch post.

Â*Last night the snow wouldn't take tracks,
Â*But apple twigs are cut
Â*Higher than porcupines.Â*

(387)

In 1971 Louis Milic took the phrases of this already existing poem and put them through a series of transformations in an experiment to generate computer poetry. Clearly, Milic did not only copy the words of Return but also its stanzaic structure of two- and three-line units. However, in Milic all lines are independent clauses (either direct statements or direct questions), which is not the case in Turner. The first two stanzas of Milic's RETURNER read:

Â*In the morning crowbars will be nearly round.
Â*Separate blankets never step again.
Â*Tomorrow I will ring him through the willows.

Â*Do mice sometimes become like deer at home?
Â*Hemlocks hiss from salad to salad now
Â*But yesterday he often pawed all the apples at the milk pan.Â*

(TurnerÂ*1971,Â*389)

At first sight this poetry looks quite original in its surrealism, and the reader may be not unwilling to see some more stanzas, although, perhaps, not all one hundred of them. But on closer examination the output turns out to be considerably less creative. Thus, every other stanza has the same structure with no fewer than six to twelve fixed words which keep on returning again and again at exactly the same place. Not only are all sentences simple sentences, all of them, and therefore also all lines, also have the same basic form: subject + predicator (+ subject attribute / direct object) with one, two or three adverbials added. If the words in the adverbials are not completely fixed, they are chosen from a very small set of two or four common adverbs. Subjects and direct objects are not realized by noun phrases of which the same head could be a noun or a pronoun, as in natural language, but the head of these noun phrases is either a noun (selected from the database) or a personal pronoun.

In describing the patterns used in Milic's and other computer poetry I will put the actual words in the texts in CAPITALS. Moreover, I will try to give the narrowest description which fits the programmatic subdivision of a line, but not include information which can be inferred from the structure of the clause in question. For example, a verb preceded by a noun (phrase) and followed by nothing else than an adverb (phrase) must be intransitive and lexical. I do not have to add this. In my analysis of sentences I will follow English Syntactic Structures (Aarts and Aarts 1982). However, it is not at all necessary that the subdivision made by the computer program coincides with a grammatical one, let alone with the syntactical distinction between functional constituents (subjects, for instance), the categories by which they are realized (noun phrases, for instance) and word classes (such as the class of nouns).

All odd stanzas in Milic, then, answer to the following pattern:
(1)Â* IN THE MORNING + noun phrase with a noun as head + WILL + APPEAR / BE / BECOME / SEEM / TURN + adjective phrase
(2)Â* Noun phrase with a noun as head + ALSO / NEVER / OFTEN / SOMETIMES + verb in the present tense + AGAIN
(3)Â* LAST NIGHT / TODAY / TOMORROW + pronoun + verb phrase (a verb in past/present/future tense) + pronoun + THROUGH THE WILLOWS

Again judging by the thirteen stanzas published in Turner's 'Returner' Re-turned, all even stanzas answer to this pattern:
(1)Â* AT HOME + noun phrase with a noun as head + ALSO / NEVER / OFTEN / SOMETIMES + APPEAR / BE / BECOME / SEEM / TURN in the present tense + LIKE + noun phrase with a noun as head
(2)Â* Noun phrase with a noun as head + verb in the present tense + FROM SALAD TO SALAD NOW
(3)Â* YESTERDAY / CAREFULLY + pronoun + OFTEN / SOMETIMES + verb in past/ present tense + noun phrase with a noun as head + AT THE MILK PAN

Possible variations in these two patterns are: that one line may be left out (the second or the third one); that a direct statement may be turned into a yes/no question with word-order inversion (five times out of 35); that occasionally a conjunction (AND / BUT / SO / YET) is put at the beginning of the second or third line.

Although Milic strictly separates noun phrases with a noun as head from those with a personal pronoun as head, his computer program produces personal pronouns at random and cannot cope with their deictic function. A random pronoun insertion is possible and can be interesting to some degree but not without first having determined (at random or not) the pronominal focus of the poem: is it written in the first person singular or any other person? Return was written in the I-form, and presumably, RETURNER follows this assumption, if only because six noun phrases used as data have MY in them: MY DOG / BOWL / PORCH / ROCKER / SISTERS / CHILD. But even a poem written in the I-form needs other possessive pronouns to refer to other living beings and their bodily parts, qualities or possessions, as Return itself demonstrates: THE BOY TURNED HIS ANKLE (388). Does this become something like I TURN HIS ANKLE in one of the later stanzas of RETURNER? Pronoun management can make or mar a computer poetry program and I will return to this issue in section 6.

Typographical arrangement or graphic representation always plays a role in written poetry, if only to separate the one poem from the other by means of empty lines, but also to indicate a stanzaic break. Turner and Milic use typographical devices like these which are common in poetry and also outside literature. Neither of them uses other graphic devices such as indentations or different typefaces or locations of words. Nonetheless, the length of text lines, too, is important in the graphic representation of poems. Thus, Return, Turner's original, continues for 34 lines of which no more than three are longer than 38 characters. (The longest line is 45 characters). Milic's RETURNER, on the other hand, has much longer lines. In the first thirteen stanzas there are several lines of 53 and 58 characters long, and the maximum length of a line is (at least) 60 characters. I mention these rather trivial unpoetic facts, because they have made me wonder whether the author of RETURNER has ever asked, or has ever had to ask, himself the question whether to use a 40- or an 80-character text mode for the screen of his computer monitor.


generated poetry (http://www.trinp.org/Poet/ComP/ComPoe.HTM)

[pille'ocheoni]

wowzers

[020200]

poetry, hmmm

i'm trying to wrote a song,
but no lyrics in here
i'm trying to get the feel,
but no girls in here.
i'm trying to get the booth to forget,
that you're in here.

nobody help, because everyone's doing stuff
well, i'm never get enough of that fluff.
but is there anything better than get into that swirl
to be involved, not to be rejected by a girl.

damn this is tooo cheesy!!##

let's write a song!

[phdbob]

All things are inpermanent
when one observes this with insight,
Then one becomes detached from suffering,
This is a path of purification.


A follower of the Buddha, with
awareness, concentration and
constant understanding of impermanence,
knows with wisdom the sensations,
their arising, their cessation,
and the path leading to their end.
Having reached the end of sensations,
a meditator is freed from craving, fully liberated.

Samyutta-nikaya 2.4.249, (Vedana-samyutta, Samadhi-sutta)

[arar]

Peace on earth we pray and sing it,
And pay a milliion priests to bring it,
After two thousnad years of Mass,
We've got as far as Mustard gas.

Thomas Hardy (about 1915 or sixteen and quoted from memory so apologies for any errors)

[aleks]

Hence loathed Melancholy
Of Cerberus, and blackest midnight born,
In Stygian Cave forlorn
'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy,
Find out some uncouth cell,
Where brooding darkness spreads his jealous wings,
And the night-Raven sings;
There under Ebon shades, and low-brow'd Rocks,
As ragged as thy Locks,
In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.
But come thou Goddess fair and free,
In Heav'n ycleap'd Euphrosyne,
And by men, heart-easing Mirth,
Whom lovely Venus at a birth
With two sister Graces more
To Ivy-crowned Bacchus bore;
Or whether (as som Sager sing)
The frolic Wind that breathes the Spring,
Zephyr with Aurora playing,
As he met her once a Maying,
There on Beds of Violets blew,
And fresh-blown Roses washt in dew,
Fill'd her with thee a daughter fair,
So bucksom, blithe, and debonair.
Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
Nods, and Becks, and Wreathed Smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Come, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe,
And in thy right hand lead with thee,
The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free;
To hear the Lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good morrow,
Through the Sweet-Briar, or the Vine,
Or the twisted Eglantine.
While the Cock with lively din,
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack, or the Barn door,
Stoutly struts his Dames before,
Oft list'ning how the Hounds and horn
Clearly rouse the slumbring morn,
From the side of some Hoar Hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill.
Some time walking not unseen
By Hedge-row Elms, on Hillocks green,
Right against the Eastern gate,
Where the great Sun begins his state,
Rob'd in flames, and Amber light,
The clouds in thousand Liveries dight.
While the Plowman near at hand,
Whistles o'er the Furrow'd Land,
And the Milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the Mower whets his scythe,
And every Shepherd tells his tale
Under the Hawthorn in the dale.
Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
Whilst the Landscape round it measures,
Russet Lawns, and Fallows Gray,
Where the nibling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest:
Meadows trim with Daisies pied,
Shallow Brooks, and Rivers wide.
Towers, and Battlements it sees
Boosom'd high in tufted Trees,
Where perhaps som beauty lies,
The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes.
Hard by, a Cottage chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged Oaks,
Where Corydon and Thyrsis met,
Are at their savory dinner set
Of Herbs, and other Country Messes,
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses;
And then in haste her Bower she leaves,
With Thestylis to bind the Sheaves;
Or if the earlier season lead
To the tann'd Haycock in the Mead,
Some times with secure delight
The up-land Hamlets will invite,
When the merry Bells ring round,
And the jocond rebecks sound
To many a youth, and many a maid,
Dancing in the Chequer'd shade;
And young and old come forth to play
On a Sunshine Holyday,
Till the live-long day-light fail,
Then to the Spicy Nut-brown Ale,
With stories told many a feat,
How Faery Mab the junkets eat,
She was pincht, and pull'd she said,
And he by Friars Lanthorn led
Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat,
To earn his Cream-bowle duly set,
When in one night, ere glimps of morn,
His shadowy Flail hath thresh'd the Corn
That ten day-labourers could not end,
Then lies him down the Lubbar Fiend.
And stretch'd out all the Chimney's length,
Basks at the fire his hairy strength;
And Crop-full out of doors he flings,
Ere the first Cock his Mattin rings.
Thus done the Tales, to bed they creep,
By whispering Winds soon lull'd asleep.
Towred Cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men,
Where throngs of Knights and Barons bold,
In weeds of Peace high triumphs hold,
With store of Ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence, and judge the prize
Of Wit, or Arms, while both contend
To win her Grace, whom all commend.
There let Hymen oft appear
In Saffron robe, with Taper clear,
And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask, and antique Pageantry,
Such sights as youthfull Poets dream
On Summer eves by haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonsons learned Sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare fancies child,
Warble his native Wood-notes wild,
And ever against eating Cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian Airs,
Married to immortal verse
Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes, with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning,
The melting voice through mazes running;
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony.
That Orpheus self may heave his head
From golden slumber on a bed
Of heapt Elysian flowers, and hear
Such strains as would have won the ear
Of Pluto, to have quite set free
His half regain'd Eurydice.
These delights, if thou canst give,
Mirth with thee, I mean to live.