Looking Outwards 06

Randomly Generated Poetry

Although the world of random visual art is vast, as is the genre of randomly generated music, I found that I was drawn toward the idea of randomly generated poetry. In a recent project from two students at Bard College, an algorithm was written that created randomly generated poetry based on the stylistic choices of a chosen poets such as Dickenson and Shakespear. In terms of their process, they begin by writing an algorithm that reads poetry from the writer and creates a numerical value based on how often the word s used(its usage probability). Next, the bot randomly chooses a word from the list. The choice is truly random but constrained to words used by the writer. The algorithm then goes on to gauge the probability of other words used in conjunction with the first word, and chooses the next word accordingly, and so on. So although it is not truly random, the code is not always choosing the words that are most likely to be used together. I really admire this work because it is created for the public by students like ourselves, and the poetry generated is really beautiful.