Work Description

From the author's foreword: "If it seems ambitious to name a computer program after the Muse of lyric poetry, it may seem impudent to write poetry with the assistance of a computer. For it is a difficult, awkward, and unnecessary way of doing things, like eating spaghetti with implements a yard long. Nonetheless, it is done, partly because it can be done but mostly because it teaches us about the nature of poetry. It is a taxing challenge because the computer, like a sorcerer's apprentice, is always surprising the programmer by doing exactly what it is told rather than what it was intended to do. The collection of short poems in this Booklet is the product of the ERATO program. Three versions of this program produced about a thousand poems of which the 32 printed here are the best. They are set down exactly as they came off the printer attached to the University's IBM 360/50 computer except that I have added the punctuation and the titles. The procedure for generating these poems is quite simple. Ten first lines from poems written during the past century were chosen for each version (see page 21 for a complete list). In each line certain key words were provided with a list of nine alternatives each, selected with the aid of Roget's Thesaurus. Line 1 is Stephen Crane's “I stood upon a high place.” The key words are in italics. The first key word and its alternatives are these: stood: stayed, ceased, looked, lasted, climbed, stared, strutted, lived. From a standard random number list 500 digits were taken and included in the program. The computer took the first number which determined how many lines each poem would have. The next random numbers on the list chose the lines which would appear in the poem. Then further random numbers picked words from each word list to replace the key words. Although random processes play an important part in the ERATO program, the success or failure of the effort is dependent upon a human agent. Someone has to choose the lines so that they will combine grammati- cally and so that they will make sense in the whole. Someone must select the alternative words so that they will be consistent with each other in almost any combination. Whoever makes these choices is the poet. The compu- ter and the program merely carry out the decisions he has made. All the poems the computer and the program can produce are possibilities the poet has allowed to occur. In that sense the poems produced by this partnership are mine more than they are the computer’s. But without the computer I would not have produced them."

Notes

Submitted by the publisher, Aleator Press.

Publisher Note