Vietnamville :: Tin tức :: Trang thơ- Hội Thi Nhân VN Quốc Tế - IAVP | How to write a perfect poem- Software for poetry

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A computer is a processor that can manipulate numerical or verbal symbols rapidly. Given a lexicon of available words and a set of rules for permissible combinations of them, it can be programmed to generate verbal strings. It becomes an interesting question, then, whether to call these strings poetry. Our current conception of what poetry is might encourage us to treat as poetry any sentence, such as: “What did she put four whistles beside heated rugs for?” which is syntactically well-formed but violates some of the semantic rules which normally govern the combining of words in Eng. For the average reader, any well-formed sentence hard to interpret or whose logic seems obscure is likely to be assumed to be poetic: “The old horse staggers along the road. Newspapers are on sale in Wall Street.” Although the average reader of prose would consider this latter sequence incoherent, a reader of modern poetry, conditioned to allusion, will supply the missing relationships and thus create a discourse. In an earlier era, however, the reader of Milton or Pope would not have done so, because the poetry of those eras was governed by the same logic of discourse as prose. Our age demands more logic from prose than from poetry.

Computer poems are of two kinds: formulary and derivative. Formulary poems consist of strings of sentences generated by means of a formula or syntactic rule such as the following: Sentence = Noun + Verb + Adverb. Each word-class in the formula contains a set of words (e.g. Verb = scavenge, misplace, corrupt, vary, yawn). As the program runs, each word in each class is selected and arranged in sequence. If each word-class contains five items, the rule could generate the following sentences: (1) Craters scavenge nervously; (2) Suits misplace wrongly; (3) Messiahs corrupt ably; (4) Sentiments vary never, (5) Graves yawn hungrily . The resulting sentences are of varying levels of regularity: (3) is wellformed; (2) is ill-formed ( misplace requires an object); (4) is inverted; (5) is meta-phoric ( yawn requires a mammal as subject); and (1) is well-formed but its violation of semantic rules, unlike (5), produces not metaphor but nonsense. The program might then generate all the permutations of the three sets of words. The following stanzas by Marie Borroff result from a formulary generation:

The landscape of your clay mitigates me.

Coldly,

By your recognizable shape,

I am wronged.

The perspective of your frog feeds me.

Dimly,

By your wet love,

I am raked.

These stanzas, resulting from two sentence rules and one stanza rule (Sentence 1 = Nominal + Prepositional Phrase + Verb + Personal Pronoun; Sentence 2 = Adverb + Prepositional Phrase + Pronoun + Passive Verb; Stanza = Sentence 1, Sentence 2), display the characteristic unexpectedness of juxtaposition. At the same time, the repetitive structure undermines the effect, implying a mechanical approach to composition. A more sophisticated program, however, can provide both variety of structure and unusual juxtapositions. But to create poetic objects by this process, syntactic and semantic rules of greater complexity must be devised and constraints such as length of line, meter, and rhyme must be added. Metrical constraints require the prior syllabification and stress-marking of each word in the lexicon. To permit rhyming, letters must be recoded into their phonetic equivalents, or the process may be simulated by storing sets of rhyming words.

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The second kind of c. p. is derivative. Here the basic principle is to take an existing line or poem and alter it in some systematic way. Hamlet’s famous utterance might become “To speak or not to speak, that is the riddle,” “To know or not to know, that is the struggle.” The following example is based on a stanza from Dylan Thomas’s poem “In the beginning” and results from marking all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the original, arranging them in alphabetical order, and returning them to the poem. The product is a poem containing only Thomas’s own words, yet very evidently not his work. In a number of experiments, college students have usually failed to identify the original:

In the beginning was the root, the rock

That from the solid star of the smile

Set all the substance of the sun;

And from the secret space of the signature

The smile spouted up, translating to the stamp

Three-pointed sign of spark and spark.

Thomas more than most poets strove for the exceptional collocation, even using mechanical means at times to achieve it. That it is difficult to distinguish between his own collocations and the computer’s reveals less about c. p. than about his. Because words have subtle but at times extensive connotative connections with each other, certain collocations are regularly inhibited even for poets, who are freer than the norm in this respect. The complete disregard of these inhibitions in c. p. gives it both its fresh and its outrageous character.

The achievement of c. p. is that it has contributed to a more accurate notion of poetic lang. No important computer poems have been produced, and none seem likely. As for the question of the author of a computer poem, the “poet” is not the computer but the programmer, whose choice of words and rules determines the final product. The poem is both the actual verse object and the program, both the abstract structure of instructions and the data, of which the actual output is only one incidental product.

C. p. probably originated simultaneously in several locations in the 1950s when engineers engaged in tasks such as machine translation began to explore the capacities of the computer for word-play. The earliest examples appear in the pages of technical journals. During the next decade, these devels. came to the attention of poets, critics, and scholars with some access to computer techniques and vocabulary. They took interest both in the possibilities of this new tool and its disturbing implications: its apparently superhuman inventiveness and the reader’s inability to distinguish with certainty between machine and human productions. Interest in the production of c. p. soon declined, but the problem of generating well-formed linguistic sequences attracted both linguists as well as those studying artificial intelligence. Programs exist which simulate the surface structure of an existing text; these may eventually lead to the production of well-formed discourse itself. — Cybernetic Serendipity (London: Museum for Contemp. Art, 1968); M. Borroff, “C. as Poet,” Yale Alumni Mag . 34 (1971); L. T. Milk, “The Possible Usefulness of Poetry Generation,” The Computer in Lit. and Ling. Research, ed. R. A. Wisbey (1971), Erato (1971); A. A. Moles, Kunst und Computer (1973); R. W. Bailey, “Computer-Assisted Poetry,” CHum8 (1974); H. Kenner and J. O’Rourke, “Travesty,” Byte 9 (1984); M. Newman, “Poetry Processing,” Byte ll (1986)

Using computer programs like "Compupoem,""Poetrywriter,""Lifesongs," and "Haikuku," we can write poems

Video Compose Poetry

http://www.rhymezone.com/

http://www.iconpoet.com/index.html

Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet Software
Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet Software is, "a screen saver that writes poetry, a Poet's Assistant that helps you write poetry (and song lyrics!), and 50 professionally - designed "poet personalities."

Virtual Poet Software
The Virtual Poet software is a tool for the professional poet and any one who wants to write a small poem with just the right words for that special someone.

If you have ever spent minutes, hours or even days searching for the right rhyme, Virtual Poet can do it for you in just seconds.
Virtual Poet contains more than 60000 words making it possible for you to have every possible word that rhymes with the word you have chosen.

Icon Poet Poetry Software
http://www.angelfire.com/ny/writesoftware/write1.html

http://search.wareseeker.com/poem-writer/

http://search.brothersoft.com/experimental-poetry

Tự điển tìm vần tiếng Anh:

http://www.wikirhymer.com/

Tips for Writing Poetry

Computer Poetry