Note:
1. The poems were automatically generated by a computer program.
2. The poems had nothing to do with the poets listed in the anthology.
Some people, like the well known Language poet Ron Silliman, were irritated. Although his blog post on the anthology begins in an amused tone, noting the project's "quirky" quality, by the end he posts one of the authors' home contact information and adds,
I might note that the last time I felt ripped off by an on-line stunt, I sued – as a lead plaintiff in a class-action case brought by the National Writers Union. And while I can’t discuss the suit, as a condition of the subsequent settlement, I will note that we could have gotten a pretty good major league middle infielder for the final amount. Play with other people’s reps at your own risk.
In the lengthy comment thread, the flarf poet Nada Gordon countered with
Whoa. It's OBVIOUS that this is an art project. A rather clever one, to my mind. It's anarcho-flarf, maybe, but not vandalism. It's not "playing with other people's reps." The poems in this anthology will neither make nor break the reputations of anyone except perhaps Stephen and Jim, who should be lauded for the grand scale of their conceptual art piece, which no doubt entailed a lot of work.
Many, many people in the poetry world have commented on it (after all, 1k+ of them are "included" in the anthology!) -- for instance, here and here. Some have even said they wish they'd really written the poems that were attributed to them!
What do you think?
Can a computer-generated block of text be a poem?
Did the compilers do something wrong in using the names of real poets (including Ron Silliman and Nada Gordon, but also poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare)?
Is it funny? A stupid stunt?
3 comments:
I think that the legitimacy of these poems comes from the programming of "Erika T. Carter". There is a real author behind every piece of poetry, and, similarly, there is a real author behind the programming of "Erika".
While some of the poems generated by the program can't really be called beautiful or even interesting, the program in itself is a work of poetry: It must have taken a lot of knowledge about what makes a poem aesthetically pleasing to put together such an algorithm.
This is an interesting way to showcase the machine's power, by assigning poems that it generated to real, human poets: The fact that some poets wish they'd really written the texts just goes to show the quality of the program.
I don't think that a computer can generate poetry, that's my personal opinion. I think it can imitate is, probably very well, and I am sure it is amusing as well, but for me a major part of poetry if the feeling, and a computer cannot print out feeling. I don't know if it is just the idea of a computer taking the place of a person in writing poetry that makes me feel this way or that there really is a major difference. I think even after reading a poem generate by a computer, just knowing that it was made by a computer makes be bias towards the work. So ya I'm not really sure that was a definite answer but I tried.
The idea was original and interesting, and the poems were about as intelligible as anything else published in the last century, or so it seems. (I joke... kind of.)
The way I see it, a computer is just a more complicated pen. A poet enters the words manually, and this software (written by a human) is just writing a whole lot more, faster. If we look back far enough, those words and sentence structures and rhyme schemes are all being chosen based on an algorithm designed by a human mind; in the end, human emotions are just as responsible for the fake anthology as they are for the real poems we read in class. Wasn’t the software designer trying to make a point, after all?
That being said, we cannot be sure that the software takes into account such factors as theme; it seems to have been designed to just put words together cleverly, with some semblance of structure. In that sense, a real poet, who puts meaning into his work, outputs a better poem -- but a deeper question could be: if I don't fully understand either one, computer-generated or human-generated, how can I really tell which is which?
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