Death to Poets

Having loved writing indecipherable, surrealistic poems as a youth and remembering how little effort was really needed in their composition, I decided recently to write a poetry virus of sorts that would automatically generate such texts.

The Algorithm is more or less this:

1) Generate Text (This is the easiest.  Using the .generate() method of the Natural Language Toolkit  for Python you can generate texts of any desired length.  They are n-gram generated, so that words will be followed by words based on the percentage that they follow them in real life.  Hence, if "whale" follows "the" 30% of the time in Moby Dick, "whale" ought be generated after 30% of "the"s in your generation.  NLTK comes with a series of readily manipulable parsed and tagged texts but you can go off and parse/tag one of your own if you think this exercise would be more exciting with a Kerouac or Phillip K. Dick novel instead of one of the 8 or 9 they supply you with.)  

2) Cut into Lines

    A) Create Monte Carlo number generator n<=14

    B) Cut to n words

3) White Spaces

    A) Create Monte Carlos number generator n < 6

    B) Assign n tab distribution across screen

4) Save to Word

5) E-mail to Poetry Publishing Sites

I was sincerely ready to create the whole system and become the most-published poet in history in a couple of days but I thought in doing so I was creating a huge disservice to people like Rimbaud and Whitman et al.  

At any rate, here's one of my Cyber-Poems, "Ahab"

 Moby Dick was 

                           fairly sighted 

from the hills .-- But the truth , the

very buttons of his bodily woes , 

           but by some experienced whaleman .

                                                                            After many similar hair - breadth escapes , -we ' ll be ready for it in two!- 

                                             -- that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds  was wholly ignorant

of the horizon , like a wild set of mariners. 

But how fair ?

Fair for death ; 

how he lords it over the world!     

                       , so that when several ships are but subtile deceits , 

not only to be no hearts above the

                                                  common sperm whale ' s turn .

 the Leviathan that crooked serpent ; and nailed to her

                                                            highness a prodigious sensation in all his persecutions ; bethinking

it -- now over the head ,           

                                     and therefore

to ye , ye mates , seeking repose within six inches of his Captain

                                                                                                to mind the regular features 

of his Dutch whale fleet to be

                                           susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction . If ye see ,

that thinking after all was caused by an awful question . 

................
It's certainly not a good poem, I realize that.  What makes me proud though is that I'd throw it in about 85th percentile of modern surrealist poems in terms of quality.  So, I beg you to ask yourself, if surrealist poems are generally terrible anyways, instead of trying to improve them, why not just automate the process of their composition?  They will continue to be horrible, only now humans can spend more time writing prose, studying engineering and uploading YouTube videos.....