Poetry machine resources

We will be trying to make a poetry machine in 10 minutes today at the National Museum of Scotland at about 1pm in the Grand Gallery.

Here are a few more ideas for machine poetry for you to try:

• Code Poetry is a QR poem game - you can either go to existing games in various cities and follow round the QR code poems or set up your own. You can find out how to take part here http://www.codepoetry.gr/about/; and there is also a cool gallery here http://www.codepoetry.gr/media/
• The Poem Generator has an approach similar to the p&g poetry machine - but without the physicality  http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm
• And there is Heretical Rhyme Generator - you give it the first line and it riffs on from there - see the example above. You can find HRG at  http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Poem/poem.cgi - there are further resources here too.
• And we couldn't not mention the ever popular Vogon (the authors of "the third worst poetry in the universe" according to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) poem writer tool from the BBC http://poetandgeek.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/vogon-poetry-generator.html

You can use these just for fun. Or try to harvest their randomness and make something new. And this is just the tips of the iceberg btw. Enjoy!

Icon Poet the writing toy

There is nothing I like more than a little writing gadget and here is an interesting one. Steve Tiffany's Icon Poet. Even without downloading the full whammy (which I haven't done as it is a .exe file and I just cannot stand the stress).

You can find its predecessor here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sIz1kCNo1A. This is a random poetry generator inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and written for the Amiga in 1988. Yup! That is a long time ago but it has a certain charm. Anyone who writes a program for that combines poetry and the Amiga gets my respect. 

Here is my small effort for improvised poetry. Remember that what you get out of these machines is like an exercise. You are unlikely to use it verbatim so be ready...


The singer is magic.  The dimple is sharp  The dust is hopeful.
Important. 

Singer the short is anxiety.  Ceremony.  Leaf.  Individual. 


Not great but the hopeful dust will stick in my mind for a little bit.

More from Steve Tiffany here: http://www.stevetiffany.com.

The uses of wood

The heart is warmed by a good list; at an elemental level, the ability to index gives us control. Look at Adam and Eve's naming or Robinson Crusoe's inventory of stores. A while back we added an index to the blog and that got us thinking about why lists were so enjoyable in a poem; handled right (that goes without saying).

A list that I enjoy is one in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene; it is in Canto One of the poem scene-setting and it is a list of tree wood and its various uses. Wow! This part of the poem was written in 1590. Its audience the leisured of Elizabeth 1st's court in England, a time when people had hours to read poetry, and Spenser, a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh had a place at that court - but even so, a list of wood. Spenser was thinking of Virgil no doubt and the Eclogues, the mediaeval shepherd's calendars which explain what agricultural jobs need to be done and when.


But the list is fantastic, it is a detailed list and begins "Much can they praise the trees so straight and high!" and so we discovers elms can be used to prop up vines, the yew springy and pliable is "obedient to the bender's will" and at this time it was used to make long-bows (still a vital part of the English arsenal). And the sallow or willow wood for the mill perhaps to make the turnery, tool handles or to lie underwater as it was also used as plaited basket-work in fish-traps.

And then it is over, 14 lines, a sonnet's length of information in this vast poem. Take a look and do some research and I defy you not to want to write a poem about one of the details that you discover.

 Much can they prayse the trees so straight and hy,
    The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall,
    The vine-prop Elme, the Poplar neuer dry,
    The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all,
The Aspine good for staues, the Cypresse funerall.


The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours
    And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still,
    The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours,
    The Eugh obedient to the benders will,
    The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,
    The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,
    The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill,
    The fruitfull Oliue, and the Platane round,
The caruer Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound.


Led with delight, they thus beguile the way,
    Vntill the blustring storme is ouerblowne;


And of course, Spenser was a bit of a geek himself. He invented the Spenserian stanza which he uses in The Faerie Queene. The stanza's main rhythm is iambic pentameter with a final line in iambic hexameter. This latter has six feet or stresses,and can be known as an Alexandrine. The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.

Machine poets: the movement of small things

I think it is the marimba music that I find so infuriating about my favourite Elizabeth Bishop poem The Bight. And of course the last line, its diminishing feminine ending as we used to call it in college.

As a poem, it is its transformative quality I love best; the quay that repels water it is so dry, the unwet water, the reality (and poetic unreality) of its evaporation. And this is underpinned by the machinery of the bight, actual, sponge boats and dredgers, and imagined: the boats become anxious retriever dogs eager for a word of praise, the dredger has a “jawful of marl” while the workaday shark fins for the restaurant trade hung out on chicken wire to dry become plow-shares, the pelicans are pickaxes hitting the water "unnecessarily hard". One imagines a hangover might have been part of this particular creative process. And indeed the pelicans are "rarely coming up with anything to show for it”.

There are no people but the poet.

And under it all, "the dry perfectly off-beat claves" of the dredger tie the whole into a maddening music, Baudelaire's music no less, and this line on occasions makes me want to hit Bishop over the head with a hammer. What are the old correspondences that lie like broken boats? And why that last line like a nervous nod of the head, “awful but cheerful” (said with an American accent what can awful mean? It reminds me of John Wayne in the Greatest Story ever told asked to do his line as the centurion with more awe, and saying "Aw, surely this man was the son of god.") The poem is left high and dry like the beach flotsam and jetsam, Bishop can do that; withdraw from the poem and leave it resonating like the dredger for the sixty five years or so since she started it on her 37th birthday in 1948.

The Bight

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare

and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,

the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,

the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire

one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock

already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash

into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,

it seems to me, like pickaxes,

rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

and going off with humorous elbowings.

Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar

on impalpable drafts

and open their tails like scissors on the curves

or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in

with the obliging air of retrievers,

bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks

and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock

where, glinting like little plowshares,

the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry

for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

Some of the little white boats are still piled up

against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,

like torn-open, unanswered letters.

The bight is littered with old correspondences.

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,

and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

All the untidy activity continues,

awful but cheerful.

Elizabeth Bishop

Machine poets: the movement of big things

Man and machine, a combination that has existed in poetry since classical times; early English examples include John Donne's The Compass

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other do.

and Spenser's dissertation in the Faerie Queene on the uses of wood

    The Eugh obedient to the benders will,

    The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,

But at the moment I am interested when machines stand for a certain kind of grit and honesty; less renaissance man who has an interest in science and more alpha male who "likes the movement of big things".

W.H.Auden's factories stand for social truth, Work has been stopped on the powerhouse; the wind whistles under/The half-built culverts while The square munition works out on the old allotments/Needs stricter watching (The Orators 1931); a society of which he is an observer and excluded (Stop all the clocks). But what often appeals to me is the more fifties brand of machine poet. Ted Hughes' Tractor is a badge of manhood endowed with all the pain of a rite of passage:

The tractor stands frozen - and agony

to think of...[]

It defies flesh and won't start

hands are like wounds already

Inside armour gloves...

In the end its superhuman power is mastered and it starts like a Blakean engine or mill. Simon Armitage's poem Very simply topping up the brake fluid (Yes, love, that's why the warning light comes on...) takes the process one step further. The chance of failure that in Hughes's poem is contained within the poet himself is split into a male expert and subservient female persona, the love in question. But Armitage's poem is a cry against the feminisation all men feel when they get out of their depth with machines; it is perhaps a logical step to men (and women) bathing in pies to assert themselves (The practical way to heaven) in Armitage's latest collection Seeing stars (something not so far away from D.H. Lawrence's nudity and wrestling).

This has to end for the moment in a call for machine poems and poets; the series is to be continued...

Machine poems

Auden at his driest and talking about factories again...more on this above. Here of the course the man is the machine, very Metropolis, very American...


The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07/M/378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

W. H. Auden



Auden is reading this poem himself here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf1klIiCdwQ


Useful review of Auden and Day-Lewis biographies and the MacSpaunday phenomena, basically an essay by Clive James, can be found here http://www.clivejames.com/pieces/shadows/auden-day-lewis