There’s this big brouhaha over at the Poetry Foundation about Reginald Shepherd’s post about intentionality, which I will not jump into except to extract this snippet from Michael Robbins, who writes, “If a computer runs a program that produces grammatical sentences at random, we do not ask what those sentences ‘mean,’ for we know the computer cannot ‘intend’ anything by them,” which I think is kind of pessimistic. I’d like to argue for degrees of intentionality (and consciousness), but lack the rhetorical skills, so thought that instead I’d put together a sampling of language-making machines or systems.
If you go to The Creative Language System Group site, you can play around with a bunch of their projects, including ZeitGeist, a neologism generator (yellow + dome = xanthodome!), and Sardonicus, a simile-finder. (The ironic category tends to produce more interesting results.)
Side-note, not a machine, but possibly a system–Sardonicus reminded me of an article I read a little while ago, David Fishelov’s “Poetic and Non-Poetic Simile: Structure, Semantics, Rhetoric.” Fishelov suggests that the four aspects of a “non-poetic simile,” topic, ground, simile marker, and vehicle, provide the basis from which to deviate and create a “poetic simile.” In his example, “John is eating like a pig,” the topic is “John,” the ground is “is eating,” the simile marker is “like,” and the vehicle is “a pig.” Fishelov lists eight principles whose violation produces a (not necessarily “successful”) poetic simile. For example, a violation of the length principle could lead to “John is eating like a pig at a trough full of apples which shine and bob in the surrounding filth.” My favorite example, though Fishelov disowns it as “strange, incoherent, and difficult to apprehend,” is, “Like the Pentagon–her eyes are square.” I would love to see someone write a program for this.
If you’re looking for a program that seems slightly closer to having consciousness, you should go talk with Jabberwacky. Tony Tost did, with excellent results:
Jabberwacky: Tell me about yourself!
User: I am a minor regional poet.
Jabberwacky: No, you’re not.
User: I am a minor regional blogger.
Jabberwacky: And I’m a major, now take this beer.
User: Thanks!
Jabberwacky: We’re all ok!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
User: Mommy’s alright! Daddy’s alright!
Jabberwacky: Who do you think you’re fooling?
User: Only myself, and other poets.
Jabberwacky: There are 10 others, apparently.
User: That’s what Harold Bloom says.
Jabberwacky: That’s good. It is good to have friends.
Then there’s the ever-entertaining Googlism, essentially an anaphora-generator, which has just informed me that:
spring is finally here may 15 2001
spring is sprung
spring is not
spring is colorful and sexy at the house of versace
spring is here
spring is late
spring is the period express from god
spring is here and the bison are migrating back into the park
spring is back
spring is the time for new year’s resolutions
spring is here”
spring is springing earlier
spring is coming
spring is busting out
spring is best time to plant a smoke tree
spring is the time for rivers to flood
spring is poem
spring is just around the corner and wouldn’t
spring is 100% minority owned source for wire forms
spring is friggin
spring is worth a mint
spring is here?
spring is in the air and with it comes
spring is springing
spring is like a perhaps hand
spring is
spring is sure to come