Generative Texts

A Self Generating Poem is a poem that generates on its own with the help of the author and a software that uses the specific code, made by the author, that creates the poem. One example of a self generating poem is Taroko Gorge by Nick Monfort. This poem focuses on Taroko Gorge National Park in the mountains of Taiwan. The poem consists of lines describing or admiring Taroko Gorge, such as “Mist roams the coves. Flows hum. Shapes sweep the stone.” Although these lines were generated by the computer, they are still able to paint a picture in your mind and take your mind to a peaceful place. Another example of a self generating poem is Camel Tail by Sonny Rae Tempest. What makes this poem especially unique is how all of the lines come from Metallica lyrics. An example of some of the lines in this piece are, “While I tend to how I feel; Like a misery that keeps me focused though i've gone astray; Just listen, they play my song; Exploiting Their Supremacy”. So, this self generating poem is pretty much just a scrambled up Metallica song, which is pretty interesting. Although it’s obvious how unique and intriguing the idea of this poem is, the true author of this piece is not quite as obvious. You could say that the credit for this piece should all go to Metallica, since it is just a reorganization of their lyrics. But on the other hand, the code that made this idea possible was written by Nick Monfort and simplified by Tempest, so they could also be given credit as authors. Even though the code was written by Monfort and Tempest though, the computer is ultimately what put the lyrics in the order that they appear in, which is the end result of all of the previous lyric and code writing. This is what makes settling on one true author of these works practically impossible to do. Everybody can have an opinion on who the true author may be, but the more important question is whether or not everybody can find meaning in poems that have been generated by a computer.

Each self generating poem has a meaning to it. Sometimes, the meaning to the poem is too hard to see due to what may be at first a confusing pattern. Most of the self generating poems we looked at are modifications of Taroko Gorge. Taroko Gorge originally was made by Nick Montfort to give the reader a poetic perspective of walking through the Taroko Gorge national park, and it’s meaning is to convey nature. Camel Tail was a modification made by Sonny Rae Tempest, and it turns Taroko Gorge from a peaceful poem maker into a thrashing Metallica song generator. Nobody can truly understand a self generating poem’s meaning until looking at it as an author and a reader. For instance, when I wrote The Infinite Road Trip (http://web.archive.org/web/20160422184634/http://www.pitt.edu/~jtb87/InfRT.html), I did not truly see how much work was going into it. All I did was just edit some of the spacing of the lines and the word pools. Little did I know that what looked like light program editing was such a heavy modification. I just wanted to edit it into something that would show a sample of what it looks like for a child with ADHD (me) on a road trip. To me, it was a scraped together program, but to the professor, it was a perfectly chaotic view of what it looks like being on a road trip with ADHD. How do I view the roles of the reader, the author and the computer? While the computer views self generating poems as a thankless job, the reader can view it as the piece of endless literature, and the author can view it as an infinitely long mind unpack handled by the computer.